


ten thousand weight in gold

by k_tron



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Crew as Family, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Temporary Character Death, because Stolen Century, it's not crazy angsty but look my dude was alone a lot and also his friends died a lot, kind of? it got long, tags are hard but this pretty much follows Balance canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:27:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25518793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/k_tron/pseuds/k_tron
Summary: The first time Barry falls in love, he is ten years old. He feels it in his heart, which is fit to burst.Reach past the stars, his father says.Barry reaches out to touch the chemistry set, and his mind soars.OR:Barry learns what it's like to love his crew, a hundred times over a hundred and twelve years. Balance from a Bluejeans perspective.
Relationships: Barry Bluejeans & Taako, Barry Bluejeans & The Director | Lucretia, Barry Bluejeans & the IPRE Crew, Barry Bluejeans/Lup
Comments: 52
Kudos: 43





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> me, re-listening to the reunion tour episodes: I should do a character study of Barry! maybe I'll do one of all seven birds!
> 
> me @ myself, 17,000 words in: remember when they were an hour into stolen century and griffin was like, "we're on year zero"? that's you.
> 
> this was supposed to be a one-shot character study of the bluejeans man himself, but I wrote too many words and now it's part character study and part me just playing in this space! this fic is almost entirely completed and will go up over the next few weeks, with chapter breaks mostly to make it more readable.

The first time Barry falls in love, he is ten years old.

He has always been a precocious child – small and quiet, but he knows what he knows and is happy to explain it. He is bright, as his father says, but that makes him different – thoughtful in a way that other children usually aren’t at that age, and hoping to connect through realities others don’t understand.

Barry is sitting at his kitchen table on a bright, shiny afternoon. He is attacking his math homework with the intensity of someone solving a global crisis; his tongue pokes out of his mouth. His mother is humming in the kitchen, a tune vaguely reminiscent of a Candlenights celebration from last year – something his grandmother sang once, as the family gathered around an upright piano. It isn’t seasonally appropriate, but that has never seemed to matter to his family. Joy is joy, after all, no matter the time of year.

The sunlight sinks into the wood, buttery and warm and highlighting the last problem Barry has to solve, when a soft clunk announces his father’s arrival.

He sweeps in like a breath of fresh air and aims straight for Barry’s mother, tucking his arms around her waist and dipping her into a dramatic kiss. It’s a familiar scene, and one that Barry would usually watch with the disgust any ten-year-old child gives displays of affection – but this problem is giving him some trouble, and he needs to focus. His tongue pokes out a bit more. Is it multiplied by pi, or does he need to add something else first?

He is interrupted by the sound of clinking bottles, and looks up to see his father’s face close to his, wrinkled and gleaming. The glint in his eyes seems to hint at a secret, and Barry hesitantly puts down his pencil. His father chuckles.

“Barry,” he says, eyes alight, “what would you say to a present?”

“What kind of present?” He is suspicious, even at this age. And he’s heard some of the other boys talking about their Candlenights presents as they passed him in the yard – balls and gloves and lessons in tackling. He always shakes his head and returns to his books. None of that appeals to him, really, though he is curious in the way he’s curious about everything.

But his father grins, and Barry can’t help but feel assured – his father has that effect on people. “I think you’ll like this one,” he whispers, and unearths a bag from somewhere by his feet. The source of the clinking, clearly, as it makes the same noise as it settles onto the table.

“I thought,” his father starts, as Barry heaves himself up to his tiptoes to peer inside the bag. It’s something… made of glass? His hands reach in almost of their own accord. His heart is beating faster in anticipation, though he can’t pinpoint why – he has everything he needs right here, in this house. In this family. They’ve never had much, but they’ve had all he’s ever wanted. And yet, his heart beats. 

And his father continues, “I thought you might like something a little more… official. To manage your experiments.”

Barry’s hands are just barely shaking as he unearths the gift from the bag. Only ever so slightly, because he has to be so careful with these tubes, these components, this wand… and as he sees it in full, a set complete with wires and test tubes and a brand new book on arcane theory, his heart nearly stampedes out of his chest. This is the first step. This is exactly what he needs to pull all those theories he’s been learning about off the page and make them a reality.

It must have cost a fortune.

He looks up at his father in disbelief. “This is… this is mine?” he whispers. His fingers, small and chubby, close around the wire framing holding the test tubes, even as his mind doesn’t dare believe it. This is… this is what he didn’t even know he needed. This is beyond anything he dared hope for. 

“It’s yours,” his father confirms, smiling, and Barry feels his heart stutter. It stutters, and then leaps, and then nearly bursts out of his chest with how quickly it expands because this is _his_. He can test, now. He can _learn_.

But his father isn’t finished. “I want you to practice,” he says, with an expression stern and kind and full of love. “Barry… you can make the world happen. Reach for those stars, bud. Reach past them.”

And Barry feels it, in the light glimmering off those test tubes, glinting off his glasses and nearly blinding him. He feels it in the twitch of his fingers, already itching for the spell components.

He feels it in his heart, which is fit to burst.

Reach _past_ the stars, his father says.

Barry reaches out to touch the chemistry set, and his mind soars.

The Institute of Planar Research and Exploration is beyond even what he imagined it could be. 

Ever since that first night, up until the light hours of the morning, up until his eyes ached and his glasses slid down his nose because his head kept tipping forward – Barry has dreamed of being a student at IPRE. It took root in his mind as the be-all-end-all of scientific pursuits: attend IPRE, have access to the best libraries and professors and equipment. Attend IPRE, learn everything.

The reality is so much better than he thought.

He spends the first few days walking around in something of a daze, just trying to take it all in. The campus is beautiful – everything is either red brick or clear glass. The buildings are interspersed with patches of green, parks and trees and picnic tables full of students laughing and studying. IPRE seems to have students of every shade – humans and elves and dwarves and everything in between. Barry watches as a tiefling walks past, gesticulating wildly at what looks like her orc girlfriend. The happiness in the orcs laughter makes him grin reflexively. 

It’s overwhelming, in the best possible way. And all of this – all of this awe – is before he even sees the lab.

His first step inside is like stepping into a dream. There’s wall to wall shelving packed with equipment – tubes and wires and scales and meters and some things Barry cannot even name (which takes him aback and makes his heart flutter, because he’s read _so much_. How can there be tools he can’t even _name_?). Endless tables filled with running experiments. Countless flames and sparks helping those experiments happen. 

As he scans the room with wide eyes, something in a beaker bubbles over and shoots off tendrils of green smoke in every direction. It’s immediately followed by a panicked, “No no no no nononono –” and a halfling rushes over, frantically climbing up onto a stool and fanning the beaker with both hands.

Barry’s fingers itch. There’s not enough diamond dust, he thinks, he could fix it if he just –

“New recruit?”

Barry is startled out of his line of thought and turns toward the source of the voice. A gnome is smiling up at him from about waist height, his hair a bright orange-red and perfectly coiffed. The same hair sits in a neat handlebar mustache above his lip, and pokes over his shoulder – the tuft on the end of a skinny, flexible tail. 

“I –” The words stumble on their way out of his mouth. But he pauses and manages to sneak another glance at the halfling’s overflowing beaker, which – for some reason – calms him down. Science has always calmed him down. 

He takes a deep breath, tamps down his blush, and smiles wryly at the gnome. “Was it that obvious?”

The gnome grins up at him, bright and impish. “I won’t hold it against you.” He nods toward the halfling. “What do you think went wrong there?”

“Well…” he hedges for just a moment, before pushing his glasses up his nose and sighing. “Not enough diamond, for one. And the heat was probably too high. I’d have started with some basic grounding spells, too, but that’s just me.”

The gnome nods slowly, thinking it over. His tail twitches. “Anything else?”

Barry shrugs. “Not just from looking. Or even from doing – it’s a mystery, right? That’s why we’re here, trying to explore. Nobody’s supposed to know all the answers right away.”

The gnome gives him a scanning glance, from head to toe, and says abruptly, “You got a name, soldier?”

Barry blinks. Soldier? “Um… Barry. Hallwinter.” He’s wondering if he should say more, give some context about why he’s here and just staring at the lab. Or is that too much?

But the gnome just nods again. “Barry. Good to meet you.” He holds out a hand to shake and, as Barry clasps it, adds, “I’ll be interested to see where those ideas take you someday.”

“I… me too, I guess?” The gnome smiles and turns to leave. He makes it a few steps away before Barry’s brain clunks into place and he remembers his manners. “Oh! Sir!” The honorific slips out of its own accord, but it feels right somehow. “What’s… your name?”

The gnome’s tail swishes, and his eyes crinkle as he answers. “Davenport. I’ll see you, Barry.” And then he disappears around the corner.

Barry turns his attention back to the lab, where the halfling has managed to get the smoke spears under control and is mopping up the resulting mess with a defeated air. The beaker smolders next to her. 

He was speaking honestly to Davenport – how is he supposed to know every secret in the universe? There’s so much. The possibilities are limitless. But this is where he can start – with exploded experiments and new equipment. His fingers feel itchy again.

Well. He can help with the cleanup at the very least. 

He pushes up his glasses one more time, and steps into the lab.

He is crossing the quad in the middle of the IPRE campus the next time it happens.

As is standard, he is carrying far too many books. He has a veritable library back in his room, stacks of tomes he’s liberated from the _actual_ library in pursuit of late-night research. It’s a mix of everything: general arcane theory, transmutation, conjuration, necromancy. The only thing he doesn’t tend to touch is divination – he likes to learn from studying, rather than asking the gods. 

Today, he’s carrying four, three of which are necromantic in nature. It’s not that he’s particularly inclined to bring back the dead, it’s just that he’s _curious_. He’s always been curious. And testing the boundaries of _life_ , even in theory – well, what could be more interesting than that?

He is awkwardly attempting to heft three books in one hand and open the fourth, just to answer a question for himself – what _exactly_ was it that Tam said about undead elixirs? – when something shoots by his elbow with the force of a stampeding rhino and knocks him aside. Barry just manages to catch himself, feet unsteady and glasses slipping down his nose, when he is knocked again, this time by a some _one_. Someone who is cackling madly and blows by in a blur of gold and sparkling blue.

He stumbles hard, making a flailing grab for his books that fails completely. They tumble out of his arms – will the librarian be mad at him for this? He can’t get banned from a library, not _again_ – and are immediately pushed to the side in a gust of wind that blows leaves up in a furious whirlwind around Barry’s face. His glasses fly away.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” he hears, and suddenly there is someone right next to him, and hands on his cheeks. “Hold up right there, babe, we gotta find you your specs.”

The hands disappear, and Barry is left with an overwhelming sense that he’s just been picked up in a tornado and deposited in a new realm of existence. He doesn’t even consider moving – though it’s not like he could go anywhere, given that he can’t see. 

It’s barely a moment before the hands are back, pressing something that feels very much like glasses into his palm. The voice is already speaking again. “They did have a little crack, but mending was like the first cantrip I ever learned because _someone_ couldn’t be bothered to figure it out and wouldn’t stop _whining_ at me about rips in his hard-won clothing,” it says, quickly and with barely a breath, as Barry fumbles his glasses back on, “so here they are, good as new! I’ll give you your books once you’ve got those back on your face.”

His hands are shaking, but the glasses are finally a steady weight back on his nose, and Barry manages to center himself enough to look at the source of the voice in front of him.

She is an elf, with tan-darkened skin and a spray of freckles across her nose. Her eyes are a vivid, golden yellow – a color he’s never seen in his hometown, but that immediately puts him in mind of sun-soaked fields and dancing fires. Her hair flips in bright, wild curls around her head. The air around her crackles with energy.

He feels it immediately. That same stutter, the way his heart picks up seemingly without cause. He feels it tingling down to his fingers, the first warning – this is big. This is something that _matters_.

The elf is still looking at him, seemingly waiting for a response, and Barry feels himself flush lightly. “Uh… thanks,” he finally manages. He can’t help but press his glasses up onto his face once more, trying for more solidity.

She grins, bright and sharp, and it shoots right into Barry’s heart. “No problem, my dude. Least I could do to apologize for my disaster younger brother.”

Barry is about to respond when there’s a distinct sound of outrage from behind her. “I can _hear you_ ,” a voice shouts, “and I am _not younger_!” 

The elf rolls her eyes. “Siblings,” she says to him in an exasperated, conspiratorial tone, and Barry blinks. He… doesn’t have siblings. Is this normal? And are they… friends, now, or something? She continues, “I’m Lup, by the way.”

He smiles faintly. “Barry.”

“Barry.” She nods, and shifts to hold something out to him. For the first time since the conversation began, Barry manages to pull his eyes from her face, down to whatever she’s offering. His books, it turns out. “So, Barold” – he blinks again – “why so many books? You trying to start your own rival Institute or something?”

Barry coughs. “Um… no, not exactly.” He reaches out to grab the books from her hands. “Just research.”

“Oh?” Lup cocks her head to the side, and her ear twitches through her curls. “Lotta research for a walk through campus. Whatcha learning?”

“Um…” Barry tugs, trying to move everything under his arm swiftly enough that she doesn’t see the titles while he comes up with a reasonable lie. The things he’s studying don’t always garner the best reputation and, as much as he’d like to fight to change that in the big picture, he really, _really_ wants to make a good first impression.

But she seems to notice his discomfort, and immediately glances down to see the cover of the book he hasn’t managed to slip away.

“Necromancy?” Her tone is incredulous. Is that bad? He doesn’t see any way that isn’t bad, and a flush steals up his neck again. Maybe he can play it off as purely academic interest. Which it _is_ , but people don’t usually see it that way, and...

There is a beat of silence, in which Barry’s blush feels like it’s about to light his face on fire. And then, in a tone of glowing and obvious delight, Lup cries, “You are a _spooky bastard_ and I am _into_ it!” She turns. “Taako! Babe! Come meet my new spooky nerd friend!” As the elf behind her starts toward them, Barry tilts his head, his blush fading as curiosity takes its place. As an only child, he’s always been fascinated by the resemblance between siblings. He looks at Lup, and then back at this new elf. Taako, he guesses? He looks to Lup again. This is beyond resemblance. They have the same face.

Well, almost the same. Lup’s is… softer, maybe. A bit more grounded, less distracted. It’s not much, but Barry thinks he could tell them apart in a crowd. 

Taako saunters up to him, and gives him a once over. It’s hard not to take a step back under the absolute judgement the look conveys, but, well, first impressions, and all that. Barry settles for shifting his feet uncomfortably. 

Apparently it’s the right move, because Taako eventually meets his gaze again with a raised eyebrow. Barry feels like he’s waiting for a court sentence. His heart, already beating fast, jumps erratically. 

When the verdict finally comes, it is somehow less than and exactly what he expected. “My dude,” Taako says, “we have _got_ to get you some new pants.”

Lup laughs, bursting and quick like the sound of champagne corks popping, as Barry looks down at his jeans. “But… I like these ones?” he answers, and he can’t help but make it a question.

Taako rolls his eyes. “You –”

“Barold,” Lup supplies, before Barry can answer.

“– Barold, studier of –”

“Necromancy,” Lup adds again, and the grin that splits her face is edged with delighted, wicked laughter. Barry wants to feel offended, but his heart is still fluttering.

“Necromancy,” Taako repeats carelessly. And then his eyes widen, just a bit. “Necromancy? Shit, seriously?”

The flush is back in Barry’s cheeks. “I mean… yeah, yes, I guess.”

Both of Taako’s eyebrows are high on his face, and Lup steps over to sling an arm around his shoulder. “See? What did I tell you?” She gives a nod to Barry, eyes dancing. “Spooky nerd man!”

Taako just looks at him for a moment. And then, as if a decision has suddenly reanimated his body, he throws his arms up in the air. “And you’re wearing _jeans_?” The force of his disbelief nearly sends the books tumbling out of Barry’s arms again. “My _man_ , you’re missing so many opportunities here! Think of the possibilities! Sparkling vampire capes! Velvet suits! _Skull cufflinks!_ ” Taako makes a disgusted noise and puts his hands on his hips, elbowing Lup in the process. 

She shifts, bumping him back, and turns considering eyes toward Barry. “I could see it,” she says, musing. “Maybe a pair of knee high leather boots. Get a bit of the necromantic pirate look going on.”

Taako tosses another arm out, this time in a gesture of exasperated thanks. “At least _someone_ knows what I’m talking about.”

Barry looks down at his jeans again. They are well-worn in just the right places, comfortable in all settings. He looks up, taking in the twins in all their sparkling energy – Lup with her elbow still tucked around Taako’s neck, Taako fingering the gold of his jacket. They burn so brightly that he knows, immediately and instinctively, that he’ll never be able to keep up.

He takes in a breath, trying to calm his still over-quick heart. “I think I’ll keep them.”

Taako groans. “Why do I even bother,” he says, and twirls away, the hem of his jacket flipping dramatically over his hips. As he stalks across the grass, he calls over his shoulder, “The masses don’t want my wisdom, Lulu, I don’t know why I try anymore!” Within moments, he is across the field and out of earshot.

But Lup stays.

She laughs at her brother, and seems poised to follow him. But, for just a moment, before she walks away – she stays. There are crinkles around her eyes and, when she smiles, a chip in her left incisor. Barry’s heart thumps.

“Thanks for the convo,” she says, still watching him with laughing eyes. “And sorry again about my shit brother.”

“I – yeah, no problem.”

Lup smiles, and that’s when he knows – after all of this, after the chaos and the certainty and the stammering – he’s right. His heart is right. This matters. 

And then she’s turning away, following her brother, with just enough attention left to toss, “See you around, Bluejeans!” over her shoulder.

Barry tucks his books more securely into his arms and, when he’s sure that no one else can see, smiles. Bluejeans. It’s a bit obvious, a bit mocking, a bit on the nose. 

He thinks he’ll keep it anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact I'm learning: waiting to post things that are already written is hard! this one is a little shorter, and Barry meets the rest of the crew.

The year at IPRE trips by in overnight study sessions, failed experiments, and so many moments of awe that Barry feels like his body will never contain it all. He sends letters to his parents every week, explaining the things he’s learned in probably far too much detail – he’s never been able to contain himself when it comes to sharing knowledge. But his father always writes back, in a careful and rounded hand, _We love you. We’re so proud of you._

He gets to know his classmates, makes friends with half-elves and firbolgs and dwarves. He feels the boundaries of his world expanding every day. And if he keeps looking around corners and rows of classroom seats for an elf with bright golden hair and wild eyes, he forgives himself – she was magnetic and chaotic and left him a bit stunned, after all. It’s only natural that he wants to see her again.

The way it happens, of course, is not what he’s expecting. 

It’s a rap on his door, early in the morning – or far too late at night, as it were, because Barry hasn’t slept yet. He leaves his book open and stumbles to his feet, weaving around scattered papers and nudging aside the occasional beaker as he makes his way to the door. When he pulls it open, smudging his face blearily, he is shocked to see Lup grinning at him.

“You look like shit,” she says without preamble. Barry’s sure his mouth is slightly open, but he can’t seem to get a hold of himself enough to close it. Seeing her is like someone sent a shock through his body. It kicks his heart into high gear. She seems oblivious to this, peering around him to take in the mess on the floor and the frankly terrifying tower of books on his desk. She whistles. “Damn, you live like this?”

Barry shakes his head, more to clear it than anything, and turns to look at his room. It isn’t the cleanest it’s ever been. “I, um… lots of research, I guess. Haven’t had time to clean up.”

“Necromancy never sleeps, am I right?”

He flings his gaze back toward her and can’t help but smile, taking in the teasing twinkle of her eyes, just as strange and bright as they were the first time. It’s not the first thing he wants people knowing about him, necessarily, but it warms him that it stuck with her anyway. “I suppose that’s uniquely true,” he says, and the warm feeling in his chest expands as she laughs.

“I knew I liked you,” Lup says, and tucks her hand into the crook of his arm. She starts tugging him down the hallway. “Come on, Barold. Cap’nport wants to see you.”

“I – who?” He twists in her grip to look back at his room, the door still gaping open. It swings shut as he watches, pushed by a phantasmal hand. “Did you just use Mage Hand to close my door?”

“Locked, too – don’t worry about your spooky experiments, babe, they’ll be fine for a couple hours.” Barry stumbles over his feet a few times as she continues, “Cap’nport. Davenport, maybe that’s better? Gnome with great hair and a tail that could probably kill a man?”

Barry nods, though he’s not sure he would describe Davenport that way. They’ve left his building by now, and the suns are bright in his eyes. Maybe he should’ve gotten more sleep last night, if this is the way today is going to go. Lup keeps talking. “Yeah, so Cap’nport wants to see a few of us in the auditorium to talk about this mission he’s got cooking – I offered to grab you so I could see if you slept in those jeans.” She glances down to Barry’s pants, which are, in fact, made of rumpled denim. She gives him a smug grin. “Guess I was right. Taako’s gonna owe me 20 bucks.”

“In my defense, I haven’t actually slept in them,” he replies, before his mind can catch up with his mouth. Lup pulls her arm out of his and shoots him an incredulous glance. Barry feels his cheeks flushing. “Necromancy never sleeps?” he offers.

Lup just snorts, and steps ahead of him to pull open the doors to the auditorium. “Taako made scones this morning,” she says as he follows her in. She immediately starts down the aisle to the small group gathered in seats just in front of the stage. “He won’t usually share, but I bet I can steal one for you.”

It’s a motley crew, sitting in the chairs at the front of the auditorium. There’s a human woman, around 20 years old, with dark skin and her hair pulled back in countless braids tucked into a bun. She has a book open in her hands, and she gives Barry a very faint smile as he meets her gaze. Next to her is a stocky, greying dwarf wearing the loudest printed shirt Barry has ever seen – some combination of neon flowers and twining vines. He is talking animatedly to the human girl, seeming not to notice her polite nods and the way she keeps looking longingly back at the pages in front of her. There’s Taako, of course, sitting a few seats away, looking haughty and bored and eyeing the dwarf’s shirt with some distaste. A pile of scones sits in his lap.

Lup shoots Barry a quick smile and starts picking her way through the seats toward her brother. Before he can follow, a voice shouts, “Barold!” and another figure shoots up from where he’s been lying across the seats in the very front row. He’s human, also around 20, with a burly, broad chest and a grin on his face. His shirt is cut off at the shoulders to show thick, muscled arms.

Barry pauses, startled. “Do I – I mean – um… hello?”

Lup laughs and the man’s grin widens. “Nah,” he says, and his voice is warm and rough-edged. “We’ve never met. I’m Magnus. But Lup told me she was off to get you and I figured I’d say hi. Hello!”

Barry looks at Lup, and she just shrugs at him before reaching over to grab a scone from Taako’s lap. He swats her hand away. “Did I say you could have one? Who was up at the ass-crack of dawn mixing this batter, huh?”

Lup pouts. “But it’s for denim-man over here!” She turns to Barry, and her eyes are pleading. “Barry, don’t you want a scone? They’re warm and buttery and I’m sure my brother” – this is punctuated by a light punch to Taako’s arm – “would be happy to share.”

Barry rubs a hand at the back of his neck. “Can’t,” he says, darting an awkward glance at Taako. “Lactose intolerant.”

This statement is met with twin looks of horror. Magnus breaks in, disbelief painting his tone, “Does that mean you’ve never had _ice cream_?”

“I, uh, eat it sometimes? But not usually with good results.”

“See,” Taako says after a pause, “this is what happens when you try to make me share.” He gives a pointed look at Lup, who rolls her eyes.

Barry smiles and settles into the seat next to the human woman. Gives her a nod. “I’m Barry,” he says, “although I’m getting the impression it’s not a name I’ll be hearing much now.”

She smiles, and it lights up her face. “Lucretia,” she replies. She looks over to where the twins are now bickering, Magnus’s face ping-ponging between them as he watches. “I wouldn’t worry about Taako,” she adds, her voice quiet. “He can be a lot, but you’ll get used to him.”

Barry considers for a moment. There is a softness in her, a kind and quiet shyness that makes him trust her immediately. “Is that something I’ll have time for? Getting used to him?”

Lucretia opens her mouth, looking slightly confused, and is interrupted by the dwarf standing up on his seat from the row ahead. He peers suspiciously at Barry, apparently having listened to their conversation. “Beats me, kid, I don’t think any of us know why we’re here.” He gives Barry a once-over. “Merle’s the name, by the way. Merle Hitower Highchurch. Cleric and follower of the great god Pan.”

Barry is curious despite himself. “A cleric? You heal?”

Merle waves a hand with an air of nonchalance, as if he’s asked that question every day and enjoys the notoriety that comes with it. “Comes with the job description.”

Questions crowd into Barry’s mind – what does Pan expect of his clerics? Where does the healing come from? – but are driven away by the sharp click of shoes on the stage. Davenport appears, authoritative as he looks down at all of them in the seats, and the room falls silent.

“Thank you for joining,” he says, and his voice is just the same as Barry remembered it outside the lab all those months ago, commanding and a bit nasal. “I understand it’s early.” His eyes rove over the six of them, snagging on the crumbs in Taako’s lap and Merle’s shirt. His mustache twitches, and it looks as if he’s fighting off a smile. “I have a proposition for the six of you, for something new the Institute is planning. It’s an exciting opportunity, one that will push the bounds of everything we know, and we’re all excited about what it might bring. But it could be dangerous, and I’d like you all to listen to me fully before you commit.”

As Davenport explains the mission, the story that takes shape in Barry’s head is so luminous, so shining, that he feels nearly breathless. An exploration of the planes. A chance to see the universe, to really _know_ it. Davenport brings up a holograph of the mission ship, a gleaming, sleek, silver thing that awes even in transparency. Barry remembers his father, bathed in puddles of sunlight all those years ago: reach for the stars, bud. Reach past them.

And then Davenport finishes, and Barry is brought back down to the ground with a final, heavy thud. The image of the silver ship feels burned in his mind, overlaid with a joyful, bright picture of his parents dancing in the kitchen. Their words on a page, bubbling and proud. How can he leave that? How can he _not_?

Lup’s elbows are balanced on her knees. She’s been leaning forward almost since Davenport started speaking, the line of her back tight with coiled tension. She meets Taako’s eyes for a brief moment before turning back to the gnome. When she speaks, her words are spiked with excitement. 

“Where do we sign up?” 

Magnus immediately echoes her, and starts into a litany of fighting techniques he’ll need to brush up on, because who knows what they’ll find out there? They need security. Merle’s face is glowing, and even Lucretia looks excited – she pulls her book to her chest and stares at Davenport as if he’s given her the greatest gift in the world. And all Barry feels is a sinking in his chest, a contemplation of all the things he’ll be leaving behind.

When Davenport’s eyes meet Barry’s, they are full of understanding. He looks at the rest of the group. “Thank you, everyone. Your enthusiasm is appreciated.” Magnus whoops, and Davenport’s face cracks into a smile like he can’t help it. “I’ll be sending more information along tomorrow, but expect some hard work in the coming days – we have a lot to do to prepare for this. Dismissed.” As the other five stand up, and the auditorium grows louder with their chatter, Davenport gestures Barry over to the stage. “Walk with me.”

They’ve left the auditorium and stepped out into the campus lawn before Davenport speaks. “You’re concerned.”

“I… yes, sir.”

“What about?”

Barry sighs. “It’s a lot to take in, I guess,” he says. An understatement. “I want to be sure I’m making the right decision.”

Davenport nods, and is quiet for a moment as he gazes across the lawn to where the rest of the group has gathered, boisterous and grinning. “I appreciate that, Barry,” he says finally, and stops walking to look up at him. “It’s part of the reason I want you on this mission. That maturity will be important.” Barry feels himself flush lightly at the compliment. “I also remembered what you said to me a few months back, and I thought you might want the opportunity.”

Barry pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose to give himself time to think, but nothing comes to mind. “Sir?”

“It’s a mystery, Barry. We don’t have all the answers, but that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To explore.” The words float back to him, carried on the memory of an overflowing beaker. Davenport’s eyes are frank and clear. “It’s two months – it’s not your whole life. We’ll likely never have an opportunity to explore like this again.” He claps a hand on Barry’s arm, the highest point he can reach. “Think about it.”

Barry watches him walk away, the grass springing back under his feet. Magnus’s voice calls out to him, asking him to join their gathering – they are lively and laughing under the shade of a large tree, all five drunk on the possibility of this mission. 

It settles into him, then, into his heart. This is not something he can walk away from. The seven of them – they have an opportunity that no one else in this world has ever had. How can he possibly pass that up?

Barry smiles at the five laughing students – his crew, now – and waves at Magnus to show he’ll be back later. He goes back to his room, shifts some papers off his desk and gives himself space. It takes him nearly an hour, but he writes it all down – the mission, the research, the chance to grab something new. It’s two months. He’ll have so many stories to tell when he returns. 

He signs it with love. The next morning he sends the letter, goes to Davenport’s office, and accepts his place on the ship.

When the reply comes, barely a week later and written in his father’s same rounded hand, it’s exactly what he hoped for. _We love you. We’re proud of you._

_Come back soon._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments and kudos make my day! or come say hi on tumblr @[kimbertsurprise](https://kimbertsurprise.tumblr.com/)


	3. Chapter 3

Something comes, huge and angry and _hungry_. It’s new; it’s a mystery.

Barry didn’t ask for this.

Passing through the planes is terrifying in a visceral, inescapable way. To be fair, it probably would have been like that even without the world-consuming force behind them – there’s something distinctly disorienting about crashing into another reality. Barry knew it was likely during the training, had prepared himself for it as much as possible. But when the Starblaster lands, when the world has righted itself and wronged itself and been put back together, the feeling hits so strongly that Barry nearly loses himself in a panic while standing on the deck of the ship. Everything is different. He _feels_ different. He can’t help but wonder if there’s a part of him in the home they left behind, which is surely destroyed by now – if the version of him that stands here and now is missing some essential piece. He can see the same fears echoed in the eyes of every one of his companions. Who, now, are the only people he knows in the world. In the _multiverse_. 

Lup immediately rounds on Davenport. “We have to go back,” she says. As Barry’s breath stutters and quickens, as he tries ineffectively to calm down, he zeros in on her fists clenched at her sides.

Davenport doesn’t take his hands off the wheel. “We can’t go back.”

“We _have to_!” Lup’s voice is loud now, echoing in the small cabin, and there are tears in her eyes. “We can’t just leave everyone in the world to fight whatever that thing is! We can’t leave them to _die_! Turn around!”

Davenport’s only response is a small shake of his head, and Lup’s hands burst into flame. 

It’s Taako who stops things before they get ugly, before Lup can explode and break something that’s barely starting. He never looks at his sister. His eyes are narrowed slightly and fixed on Davenport, unwavering as he says, “I think what he means is that we can’t go back. Physically. Ever. Did I get it right, Captain?”

Davenport’s fingers tighten in a short spasm, but he nods. “Something happened to the planar system that let us slip through. It’s not happening anymore.” He shoots a quick glance back at Lup, to where she’s turned toward her brother. Her hands are no longer covered in flame. Her face looks despondent. Davenport trains his eyes toward the front of the ship again. “We’re stuck.”

The thought clunks between everyone on the deck, heavy and hard. Barry’s heart, barely under control, picks up again. He can’t help but look out the window at the sky rolling past, a muted yellow that’s so different from his home’s purple. Is this… it? Is this what they have now?

Magnus is the one who breaks the silence. “I mean,” he starts, and eyes across the deck slide to him, worried and wide, “at least my hard candy made it with us.”

Taako groans and Lucretia lets out a shaking breath that may or may not be relief. The tension dissipates so dramatically it’s almost visible. Merle grumbles, “When someone bonks your head in for dumbassery, kid, don’t come crying to me for a heal.”

“Like any of you could take me in a fight,” Magnus scoffs. He flexes his arm and pats it. Looks at Lup. “You ain’t got nothing on these.”

Lup shakes her head, but her shoulders loosen. Her hands spark into flame once more, but it’s smaller. More contained. “Wanna bet on it?” she says, tilting her head – and then Davenport is stepping in, issuing orders to check the ship and scout for someplace to land. He sounds exasperated, but the moment of terror has passed. They are together, the seven of them. They were chosen for this. They will adapt.

This is the mantra that runs through Barry’s head as they land the ship in a clearing, as they take their first steps out into this world and find thousands of animals, coexisting peacefully. It’s what he tells himself when the trees seem wrong, and his bed doesn’t seem to fit. He works, like it’s all he can do.

Because work helps him navigate the nights when he cannot breathe, when the image of a column of tar slamming into his parents’ sun-dappled kitchen plays on loop behind his eyelids and makes him retch. He tries to be quiet on those nights. He tries not to let his panic spill over into the rest of the crew; they’ve all lost something, after all.

One morning, though, he wakes with tear-crusted eyes to a cup of tea, steaming outside his door. The warmth of it sinks into his hands, and he tries to match his breath to the curl of the steam – in, out. Swirling and calm. When he arrives to the ship’s tiny kitchen, clutching the mug and inhaling deeply, Lucretia is sitting at the table and smiling at him. She has a pen and an open notebook.

“Sit,” she says, pushing a chair out with her foot. “Tell me.”

So he does. 

He talks about his parents, and the first chemistry set his father gave him. He describes his mother’s elaborate cakes and sitting around the table for seder, talking with adults about arcane theory and somewhat wistfully ignoring the sounds of the kids his age laughing and pushing each other in the other room. He describes the fish he had as a child, the one he named Gary and accidentally killed when he forgot to feed it for two weeks during a family vacation. He hasn’t thought about Gary in years, but the words pour out of him now – it seems so important. It’s all so important.

It becomes a routine between him and Lucretia: early mornings, cups of tea, and time spent capturing the world that they’ve lost. It helps, remembering. It makes everything feel less hopeless. And when Magnus comes in one morning, loud as he always is but seeming a little lost, Barry looks at Lucretia, and she nods.

“Hey bud,” Barry says, pushing a chair toward Magnus with his foot. “Got any stories you want to tell?”

Magnus cocks his head for a beat, and then a grin blooms across his face. It makes him look younger. “Did I ever tell you guys about the dog I saved? He was the _best_ ,” he says happily, and then they are off and running, compiling stories about Twosun from the whole crew. Davenport talks about the opera he saw years back with stars in his eyes; Merle describes his home garden with such loving, explicit detail that Barry and Lucretia can’t help but look at each other with raised eyebrows and pointed coughs. Lup and Taako seem reluctant to say much at all, but Barry gathers that this new reality is not as disorienting for them as it is for the rest of the crew – they’ve been on the run before. Their recollections of home are hard and unyielding where his are soft and full of joy. 

Barry steps back after a while, as Lucretia has been the leader of this since the beginning and knows exactly how to ask people questions that will lead to full answers. He starts to feel curious about the world they’re now living in, pushed and cajoled by Lup – she wants his help making friends with the animals, seeing what they can learn. The curiosity builds, even though it feels wrong, sometimes, to be curious when a whole world is dead – he can’t help who he is. And he still wants to make his father proud.

He is sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon, laughing at Lup as she tries to draw a scientific diagram of the enormous wolf they met upon landing – it looks more like a sheep – when Taako bursts in the door.

“You have to come,” he says, and his eyes are alight with a thrill that Barry recognizes – there’s some discovery here. Something _new_. “Barold, you too. You both have to come.”

Which is how Barry finds himself living with a mongoose family in the woods, highly uncomfortable and entirely entranced. He finds himself swept up in the project of translating a new language, of writing and rewriting a code that might help them master it – taking notes, making sounds that are barely more than grunts, watching and listening and testing. Taako is right there with him the whole time, surprisingly diligent for his ostensible flippancy. Lup contributes occasionally, but mostly spends her time inventing games with the mongoose children. 

“It’s a different kind of communication,” she says cheerfully as she plops fluffy pancakes down in front of a bleary-eyed Taako and Barry for the fourth morning in a row. “Some would say even more important, since I’m building the relationships we’ll need to actually test this thing. But keep up the good work!”

Taako flips her off.

The project calms Barry, helps him adjust. His nights of panic become few and far between. And the work pays off, eventually, for all its frustration. The first time the three of them sustain a conversation with the mongoose father – short, direct, about the weather and location of some mushrooms – Taako looks over at Barry and grins. Barry can’t help but grin back, and then laugh, and then grin some more. Lup lets out a whoop (it scatters the birds, who chatter insults angrily down at them, and Barry _understands that, too_ ). 

His heart is so full it could burst.

It’s an awkward year, in some ways. They are all just starting to know each other, and this is the most difficult scenario in which to know someone: nothing is familiar, and no one is comfortable. Barry learns that he should never, ever interrupt Lucretia when she’s deep in a journal entry, even to ask if she wants more coffee; he gets roped into arm-wrestling Magnus to practice what he’s learning from the Power Bear, and can’t move his arm for three days; he offers to help Taako with dinner and is stared down with a glare so powerful he doesn’t go into the kitchen for the rest of the week. They’re prickly, his new teammates. He’s still learning his way around them.

But, overall, it’s good. It feels like they’re making progress, and Barry has never loved anything more than good, steady research. Every morning he wakes up, takes a deep breath of the new, shifting air, and feels more comfortable. He is settling in. He is making a place for himself.

And then the year is up.

Lucretia is the first one to notice it, penchant for observation that she has. She is sitting outside the building that houses the Court, leaning against a tree and sketching idly. Barry is next to her, flipping through his notebook. He is just wondering if he should try to get the recipe for the mongoose family’s favorite meal, wondering if Taako can make it edible for humans, when Lucretia makes a curious noise. “Huh,” she says, and Barry looks up.

“Hm?”

“Do you – does the grass look less… green, to you?”

Barry blinks at her, then turns his eyes down to the grass around him. It takes him a moment, but – it _does_ , somehow. It’s like the color is being leached out of the world, and everything is turning grey.

Lucretia gasps. “No,” she whispers, “oh _no_ –”

Barry follows her gaze upward and sees it, blooming across the sky just like it did on their home planet a full year ago: inky blackness, cut with blades of neon color, tearing through this new world and swallowing all it touches. As they watch, it seems to drip, slowly and inevitably pooling down toward the earth off in the distance – and then a column of tar slams down barely 300 feet away, roiling and massive and bursting with shadows.

“We have to go,” Barry says, staring as the shadow of a massive, misshapen ogre trudges out of the column of darkness. “Lucretia, we have to go _now_.”

“But…” She is frozen, white knuckled on the spine of her notebook. Her eyes flit wildly from the shadow to the column to the Court, where all of their friends are training. She looks so young. Gods, they’re all _too young for this_.

“Come on, they’re coming, I promise, come _on_ –” and Barry grabs her arm just as Lup and Taako fly out from between the looming doors, sprinting like their lives depend on it. (Which, Barry reminds himself in a strange moment of clarity, they probably do.)

“Cap’n says hit the ship!” Lup shouts as she and Taako barrel past. At the same time, without slowing, she blows out a breath, throws out her hand, and shoots a fireball straight at the ogre shadow. It explodes in a puff of black smoke. “Oh, _fuck yes!_ ” 

Barry tugs on Lucretia and they both stumble into a run, loosely aware of Davenport closing in behind them, yelling, “Go go go go _go –_ ”

It’s chaos. They pass squirrels and deer fleeing just as they are, birds screaming overhead, trees disintegrating into ash and smoke. Tar, dripping over the land, consuming and breaking and _feasting_ –

And then they’re at the ship, scrambling in and up. Davenport races to the controls, and it takes him barely a moment before the Starblaster is lifting into the sky, dodging haphazardly around tendrils of black fire. 

Barry sinks against the wall. His hands are shaking. His glasses, slick on the sweat of his nose, are sliding down.

And then Lucretia says, panting and barely able to catch her breath, “Magnus. Where’s –”

Lup whips her head around, her fingers still sparking, while Merle lifts his torso from where he’s collapsed on the floor. Taako meets Barry’s eyes, and there’s a look of abject _horror_ there as he realizes – as they all realize – Magnus didn’t run. Magnus is not here.

Barry feels as if someone has taken to his chest with a cleaver.

There’s a choked, muffled sound from the front of the ship, but Davenport remains steady as he wheels the ship through the storm. All Barry can see of his captain is tight shoulders and firm hands. He can’t tell if Davenport is shaking.

They are six now.

Lup is yelling again – “We have to go _back_ , we can’t just _leave him_ ” – and it’s so familiar, all of it: the panic, the danger, the aching heavy grief that he can’t even fully consider. Because even though his body feels shaky and heavy and disconnected, even though they are _six_ and Magnus is _gone_ ,Barry’s heart is in his mouth because they are still dodging tendrils of inky black and the world is being _eaten_ around them. There’s no space for grief because he’s filled with fear. 

It is a few heartstopping, heartbreaking moments before the world goes soft, jiggly somehow. The Starblaster bounces. And Barry feels himself move, though it’s nothing he’s directing his body to do – it’s like threads are tugging at his every cell, remaking and repositioning him into something more familiar. 

It takes him a few blurry moments to orient himself, but he manages to blink away the fog just in time to see threads of white light circle around his crewmates and disappear. It looks like they’re sucked into the engine, somehow. Were they sucked into the engine? Barry is about to take a step toward the back of the ship to investigate, curiosity overtaking everything else, when his eyes snag on someone on the deck. 

A burly, bare-chested, black-eyed someone.

Magnus is standing, threaded in white light. It seems more reluctant to let him go than it had the rest of them – it swings around his thighs, caresses his shoulders. It spends an extra few moments curling around the panes of his face. When it finally disappears, there is complete silence.

Magnus blinks and touches a hand to his forehead, then pulls it away in a motion that implies he expects to see blood. “What… happened?” 

Lucretia lets out a muffled half-laugh, half-sob into hands that are pressed against her mouth. “You – I –” and she stumbles toward him, almost tripping as she throws her arms around his neck.

Magnus pats her awkwardly on the head and meets Barry’s eyes over her shoulder. “Did I… die?”

Barry takes him in – Magnus’s red jacket, pulled tight over his shoulders; his hair, rough and wiry and exactly the length it was when they left IPRE, instead of the shaggy mess it was at the end of the year; his black eye, purple and bruised and time-stamped on his face. Yes? No. Maybe, but it didn’t take?

He gives a helpless shrug. “You’re… back now, I guess?” he says, somewhat lamely, but what is he supposed to say in a situation like this? When he’s seen his friend die, when he’s experienced the end of the world not once but _twice_ , when they’ve all come back together just as they were before, only a year heavier – what do you say?

Lucretia chokes another sob out into the quiet, hugging Magnus even tighter around the neck, and Barry sees Taako’s head swiveling between them and him. He braces himself, even as his body feels lighter and heavier than it has in ages – Magnus is back. Magnus is _back_ , and none of them have any idea what that means.

Eventually, Taako cuts into the moment. “Well this is touching and everything,” he says slowly, “but I for one am royally freaked that Maggie here died and came back to life because of some weird-ass spooky light shit. Anybody else?”

Lup raises her hand. Merle, after darting his eyes between Taako and Magnus and Barry a few times, emphatically says, “ _Yes_.” 

Taako steps over to Magnus and, without warning, pokes him in the forehead.

“Hey!” Magnus cries, batting him off and dislodging Lucretia in the process. (She hugs her notebook to her chest and quiets to mere hiccups, watching the scene with wide eyes.)

“What?” Taako asks, squinting suspiciously and leaning closer to Magnus’s face. “I had to make sure you weren’t an evil ghost-Magnus trying to compromise our mission.” 

“Whatever our mission is now.” It slips out almost unbidden, the thought that’s taking shape in Barry’s head. What _is_ their goal now? They were sent out on a scientific, information-gathering, two-month journey – what does it mean for them that they’re now facing a world-devouring apocalypse and apparent regeneration?

In the silence that reigns after Barry’s words, Magnus pushes his palm into Taako’s face and shoves him backward. Taako barely stumbles. He takes a moment to dust off his clothing, then flicks a quick glance toward the ceiling and says, “Well. On that cheerful note, Barold, I need a drink. Lulu?”

Lup is staring at Magnus, but she tears her eyes away to look at her brother. There is a beat, in which they seem to have a silent conversation – Barry has started to get used to this, over the course of the year – and then Lup nods. “Yeah,” she says, “same. Whip up some of those mint things, huh, ‘Ko? I’ll start dinner.”

“Mac-and-cheese?” Magnus cuts in hopefully.

Lup smiles as Taako disappears into the kitchen. “Yeah, babe, we’ll make mac-and-cheese. And cornbread and pumpkin pie and all your favorites.”

“Oh, _cool,_ ” Magnus says, and follows Lup and Taako into the kitchen.

Barry watches him go, then takes a moment to look at everyone left in the room -- Merle, cut on his cheek; Lucretia, still teary-eyed; and Davenport, who is still and silent and looks like he wants nothing more than a stiff drink and a hot bath. 

Merle meets his eyes and shrugs. “What the fuck, huh?”

Barry can’t help but laugh, even as the weird, mind-bending reality they now find themselves in threatens to press in on him from all directions. What the fuck, indeed.

Dinner that night is a loud, boisterous affair. Everyone gets drunker than they intend to on Taako’s mint juleps – just what they need to toast the hellish end of a world and the rebirth of their apparently invulnerable security guard, he declares. Merle pushes the green beans off the table so he can have more room to dance. Lucretia’s hair straggles out of its bun as her cheeks flush with rosy laughter. Taako performs a lip sync, which puts everyone – including Davenport – on the floor, and promptly promises he’ll never do it again. 

If everyone’s hands shake just a bit, if there are a few tears wiped away, if everyone keeps making excuses to touch Magnus on the shoulder, on the hand, on the knee – well, no one mentions it. And Magnus doesn’t seem to mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments and kudos make my day!!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Taako dies. Barry tries to give some comfort.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a long one! content warning for some blood mention, but nothing beyond canon. I like this chapter a lot, I hope you do too!

Barry thinks it might get easier, watching his friends die over and over again. Knowing that they’ll come back better than ever in the next cycle.

It doesn’t.

“This is the dumbest thing in the whole fucking universe. And don’t tell me I can’t say that, because I am _uniquely_ _qualified_.”

“Well, to be fair, there’s a lot of the universe we haven’t seen yet,” Barry replies mildly, watching Taako pace from one wall to another. The room they’re being held in is close and stuffy, constructed with wood and a smattering of straw over the dirt ground. It’s hot, and Barry has taken off his IPRE cloak to use as a cushion. Taako’s still covers his shoulders. Barry’s sure it’s a fashion statement more than anything else – Taako likes to look intimidating. The cloak snaps against his heels as he spins.

It’s the 16th cycle, and their quest for the Light has not gone well so far. They tracked it across the skyline to where it fell, which seemed hopeful, but by the time they landed it had already been taken by the locals. It’s always harder to stomach the hoops required to get the Light from local populations after a cycle of failure. The fifteenth was a mess of fire creatures and fumbling, uncomfortable camping. They didn’t get the Light, and were forced to watch a burning world be swallowed by darkness. Barry was hoping for something simpler this time around.

But wishes don’t always come to fruition, and Davenport lands the Starblaster nearby, as inconspicuous as could be expected for a massive, alien spaceship. They commence the planning. Barry stays quiet, for the most part – diplomacy is not his strong suit. He trips over his words too often, despite Lup insisting that he most often says the right thing. He would always rather bury himself in books, or tease out a new theory on a chalkboard.

He’s built for research. He’s built to test and try and test again, not to convince people he’s trustworthy.

In this particular case, it doesn’t matter. Davenport decides that he, Lup, and Lucretia will go retrieve the Light. They’ll leave in the morning. Lup’s grin is a knife’s edge in the eerie, greying twilight. 

Except that evening, there is a fight. It hasn’t been uncommon, over the course of these endless cycles – with seven people living in tiny quarters, escaping the apocalypse over and over again, some bubbling tension can only be expected. Usually it’s small and easily mitigated. Usually, Barry can put his head down and work until it’s all over.

When Lup and Taako fight, though, he inevitably becomes involved. Everyone takes turns becoming involved, really – Lup likes to walk into someone’s room and scream into their pillow, while Taako always stalks outside with a cloud of anger behind him. It never lasts long. Barry doesn’t – didn’t – have siblings, but he’s come to understand that this is normal: a fight over stolen shoes, an hour of fuming, and then one of the twins will poke their head in and ask for help pranking Davenport. 

The fight of this evening starts over the chili – Lup keeps adding cumin when Taako isn’t looking, until he eventually spins around and catches her with a mage hand sprinkled over the bubbling pot. 

“If you don’t stop I will steal all your boots and cut off the left heel, just _leave it_ \--”

“I just wanted to make it taste good, so sorry for being better at this than you are –”

It doesn’t take much, after that, for the blow up to happen. Lup’s hands start sparking, and Barry is about to step in when she throws them up in the air in frustration and stomps out. Taako, huffing, does the same a moment later.

Barry, Lucretia, Magnus, and Merle look at each other from where they sit in anticipatory hunger around the shabby table. “I did it last time,” Magnus points out.

“And someone’s gotta watch that chili,” Merle adds, hopping up and waddling over to the stove. “Gotta say, I think Lup was right. The cumin ratio is just right here.”

Barry meets eyes with Lucretia. She sighs. “I’ll take Lup?”

“Yeah, I’ll get Taako.”

Finding Taako is never the easiest thing – he is quiet-footed and sneaky, in a way Lup has never managed to be. But when he’s angry he has a tendency to ignore those instincts in favor of inflicting damage on the nearby environment, and Barry uses this to follow him through a trail of broken branches and heavy footfalls in the forest. He finds Taako sitting under a tree and shredding a branch of its leaves.

“Not gonna help, Barold,” the elf says, without looking up.

Barry stops a few feet away, noting with some interest that the tree Taako is under seems to be the focal point of a broad clearing. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay, bud.”

Taako scoffs. “Level who-knows-what wizard, you really think I can’t take care of myself? Taako’s got spell slots to spare.” He throws a leaf onto the ground, glares at it. “Not coming back until Lup gets her shit together.”

Barry wants to smile, tries to hide it. “You sure? I think Merle was in charge of the chili when I left.”

Taako’s ears shoot up, and his head follows immediately after, pure indignance in his expression – and then his face changes, eyes widening, ears flattening back. “Did you –”

And then there is a sharp crack against Barry’s head, and he stops seeing much of anything.

When he wakes up, he is slumped against a rough, wooden wall with a painfully aching head. He can’t help the groan that escapes as he shifts and touches his face. His glasses are gone. He always hates cycles when someone takes his glasses.

He hears a muttered, “Thank fantasy _Jesus_ ,” and something thumps to the ground next to him. Barry scrabbles his fingers across the dirt and straw for a moment before they touch something cold and familiar – round lenses and a metal frame. Which means –

“If you’d died, I would have somehow figured out how to break open that stupid bond engine and yell at you through the void,” a voice says, as Barry shoves his glasses on and blinks owlishly at the far corner of the room. Taako is glaring from where he sits against the wall, arms loosely wrapped around his knees. His ears are pressed flat against his head. As Barry struggles into a more conventional seated position, one ear twitches upright. “There’s no way in hell I was gonna tell my sister you died coming after me.”

Barry doesn’t reply, instead rubbing the back of his head and examining his hand to see if it comes away with any flakes of blood. Nothing. Which indicates just a bad bump, or a concussion, maybe. Better than bleeding out. He watched Magnus do that two years ago and has no desire to repeat the experience.

Taako watches him. “You good, my dude?” he asks, and his voice is a thin attempt at nonchalance. 

Barry nods, though it sends a throbbing wave of pain through his head. “Yeah, fine. Uh… I guess we should’ve done a little more research before landing, huh?”

Taako snorts. “No shit, Barold.” He slumps back against the wall with a huff. “Couldn’t have been Lup who stomped off into the spooky death forest _,_ ” he mutters, and his hands flutter between tapping at the ground and twisting his hair. “No, she just has to have pillows around to be mad. And now she’s laughing it up with over-spiced chili while we rot away in this hell block of a fantasy Lincoln Log cabin. She doesn’t even appreciate good chili. You know who appreciates good chili? This cat, that’s who.”

Barry’s mouth quirks into a smile he can’t help. It’s been sixteen years, and he knows his crewmates better now than he’s ever known anyone. He knows that Taako’s complaining is the way he manages the panic he feels at being away from his sister – at not knowing where she is, at being too far away to protect her. Barry knows that this cell will make Taako anxious and restless and angry, because Taako does not like being caged and grounded. Especially without Lup.

So, Barry watches Taako pace with a wealth of understanding. But they’ve been traveling together for sixteen years, through the worst the universe has to offer, and he can’t help but poke a bit. “It’s a big universe, you know,” Barry says, shifting to a cross-legged position and adjusting his glasses. “We’ve only seen a fraction of it. And I don’t even think we know how much we haven’t seen, because all the math comes from Twosun and we _know_ we were missing some key information there.”

Taako has stopped pacing, and is now glowering at Barry with his hands on his hips.

“So,” Barry continues, “statistically speaking, this isn’t the dumbest thing in the universe. That’s still coming, probably.”

Taako throws up his hands, and – even with the crust of dirt that covers both of them, even with the spiderwebs on the walls and the scratchy straw under his legs – it is so reminiscent of the first time they met that Barry grins. “I would literally murder you if I didn’t know it was pointless,” Taako says.

“Sure, bud,” Barry replies, and then ducks, laughing, as Taako tosses a handful of straw at him. Taako opens his mouth – to say something scathing, no doubt – and then stops short as a new sound echoes through the wooden wall. A thump, a clank, and then a high whine as the door inches open.

Taako seems to abruptly change his mind about what he was going to say. Instead of retorting, he cocks his head at Barry. “You ready to break outta here, bubbelah?”

Barry looks at his hands, then at the door. “Get the Light some other way?”

“My thoughts exactly.”

Taako pulls out his wand with a sharp, toothy grin. Barry moves to mimic him, patting down his robe, except –

“Shit. Taako, _shit_ ,” he hisses. “I don’t have my wand.”

Taako’s face runs through a waterfall of emotions in a split second. His eyes widen, then narrow. He goes from shocked to disbelieving to ironically amused, before finally settling on exasperated. “Gotta do everything myself, don’t I,” he says, as the door creaks open farther.

In that sliver of a moment, as Taako looks at Barry and Barry looks at Taako, Barry’s heart drops like lead. Taako has an idea. Taako is going to do something both very stupid and very brave, and all signs point to him not making it through this cycle alive.

And suddenly Barry is desperate. “Taako – no, let’s just – let’s just not fight, okay? The crew’s coming, we can wait –”

But Taako shakes his head, already rolling up his sleeves. “Nah, that ship sailed when they bonked you, Barold. Hey, make sure Lup doesn’t do anything stupid this cycle, okay? That’s on you.” 

Before Barry can reply, before he can think to say anything else or grab Taako’s wand or _anything_ , the door flies open and Taako casts Banishment.

It’s not completely new to Barry, being banished. Taako’s done it to him before, in one of the first cycles, just to see what happened – what do demiplanes look like in other realities? Are they different? But no, it was just a plain wooden room, small and unadorned. The first time, after the minute had passed and Barry popped back into existence just where he was standing, he asked Taako if the space he created was based on anything. If he was pressed, Barry explained, he would’ve said it looked like the shabby, crooked interior of a caravan. Taako’s face shuttered. Nothing, he said. Just a room.

This time, it’s the same. Wooden slats and nothing else, just the slightly disorienting feeling of adjusting to demiplane gravity. Barry should feel calm, maybe, or relieved to be taken out of the fight. Instead he just feels empty. The sight of Taako’s eyes – golden and determined and just the smallest bit wide with fear – won’t leave his head.

When the spell ends, Barry lands on his knees exactly where he was standing. His cloak is still on the ground, and he picks it up and shakes it out with mechanical movements. There are a few bodies on the ground, cracked and smoking with the telltale signs of magic missile. 

Barry was unconscious coming into the village, but he had assumed it was some kind of town, with a number of homes and shops. As he steps through the blown-open door, though, he realizes he was wrong. It’s not nearly that big. It’s just the structure they were kept in and a few tents, which are now scattered pieces of canvas. There’s some kind of pit in what looks like the center of the former encampment. Nothing moves – Taako was thorough, it seems. Except – 

Something shivers across his vision, next to the pit. A figure Barry had taken for another local waves a small hand from where it slumps against a log.

Barry feels a bolt of electricity shoot through his body, and suddenly he is running – sprinting toward that figure, sliding to a stop in front of it. It looks up at him with tired eyes, a bright golden-yellow.

“Pretty impressive what Taako can do in a hot sixty segundos, huh?” Taako says. His voice is weak, small, pained. He coughs, and the sound rattles from his lungs. “Ugh, _fuck_. Gross.”

Barry squats next to him. “Can you stand? I don’t know how far we are from the ship, but I can help – we’ll get you back, Merle can heal you –”

Taako cuts him off with a weak wave of his hand. “Nah, my dude. Not worth it.” His hand goes back to his side, where Barry can now see an arrow driving up. It has almost certainly punctured a lung. Barry could maybe stabilize him enough to get him to the Starblaster, but he has no idea where it is, and his healing is rusty, and moving Taako would probably be worse –

Taako is looking up at him with tired, amused eyes. “It’s all good, Barold. I know when I’m cooked.”

“Only because you’re such a good chef,” Barry says helplessly, and Taako laughs, loud and wheezing.

“Oh, _fuck_ , that was bad!” His laugh rasps out for another breath before it turns to coughing, and then it sounds like someone is playing his lungs like a drum. There is blood on his lips. He spits it onto the ground, a sharp movement, then shakes his head. “Holy Pan, I can’t believe that’s the one you’re going to make me hear on my deathbed.” 

Barry tries to smile, but there are tears in his eyes. Taako elbows him in the knee. “Pull it together, my man,” he says. “My sister’s never gonna date you if you get all weepy when someone makes fun of your jokes.”

Barry lets out a sound that could be a laugh, and Taako grins. Blood shines on his teeth. “Hey, do something for me, will ya?” Barry nods. “Give this to Cap’nport?”

And he untucks the arm that’s been wrapped under his cloak, wincing, before unearthing something that glows warm and ethereal in his hands.

For a moment, Barry can’t pull his eyes away from the Light, and something niggles in his brain at the thought. Why can’t he look away? Is that… does the Light do that to him? But then he manages to look at Taako, and all he can see is his friend’s face, bathed in the glow of all creation but still pale and tired. He looks so much like Lup. He looks like one of the only six people in the multiverse that Barry can count on, now. “You – how?”

“Taako gets it done, baby,” Taako replies, with a half-wink. “Natch.”

Barry looks down Taako’s hands, shining and beautiful and holding all the possible hope for this world. He watches them slump, go limp, and catches the Light as it begins to fall toward the ground. He tucks the Light in one pocket and grabs Taako’s hands, which feel cold and shaky. “Hey,” Taako says, and his breathing is labored. Barry squeezes his hands; his throat is too tight to speak. “You know what I should’ve said to those fire bugs last cycle? Been driving me crazy that I didn’t do it when the Hunger vored them.”

“I – no?”

“Enjoy your last fifteen minutes of flame,” Taako says, and he is grinning even as his eyes close. 

Barry takes the time to build a fire, even though they stopped having funerals somewhere around Magnus’s third death. It’s what Lup would do. The heat sinks into his back as he walks into the forest.

It doesn’t even take him a full day to get back to the Starblaster – they hadn’t come so far, after all. When he emerges from the trees, the Light tucked in his hands, he hears rather than sees that Magnus is on duty – the shout of “They’re back!” reaches a decibel that only Magnus can.

And then there is Lup, grinning at Barry as she flies out of the hold – her feet are slipping on rocks when she launches herself at him, wrapping both Barry and the Light in a stranglehold. “We were so _worried_ ,” she breathes, burying her face in his neck. “You both just _disappeared_ , all night, we didn’t know where you _were_ –” she cuts herself off, tilts her face up to look at him. “You both…” Peers over his shoulder. “Um, babe? Where – where’s Taako?”

Barry’s hands tighten on her jacket for just a moment before he pulls her back and sets her down gently in front of him. “Lup,” he says gently, and her eyes immediately fill with tears.

“No,” she whispers. “You’re not – he’s not – _no_ –”

“Lup –”

And he’s clutching at empty air because she’s gone, backing up toward the ship with a horrified, devastated look in her eyes, shaking her head. It takes barely a breath before she is inside, swallowed by the darkness of the open door. The rest of the crew stands on the deck, staring at him with wide eyes. Lucretia’s hand is over her mouth. Magnus is in tears.

Taako has never died before. Barry thinks maybe everyone convinced themselves he couldn’t.

Barry goes to Lup’s door hours later, the last of the crew to try. He didn’t think she’d want him around, but Lucretia insisted upon it. “If there’s anyone who’s going to get her to talk, it’s you, Bluejeans,” Lucretia said kindly, tea cold in her hands after an unsuccessful attempt to get Lup to open the door enough to receive it. “Go try.”

So he knocks, and tries not to be too surprised when the door swings open.

Lup stands there, hair disheveled and eyes red, her oversized t-shirt uneven around her neck. The look in her eyes is not sadness, or rage – it is emptiness, blank and dead. The color is the same golden-yellow as her brother’s. For a moment, Barry expects to see blood on her lips.

“I,” he starts uncertainly. “Can I – can I come in?”

She nods, just the slightest movement of her head, and turns to walk into the room. There are clothes all over the floor, piled on Taako’s bed – it looks like she has emptied his closet, spread it across the room. She picks up a bedazzled tank top as she sits, running it through her fingers. 

He takes a few hesitant steps in, and looks around for a moment before kneeling carefully in front of her. “Lup?”

“Barry,” she whispers, and drops the tank top to reach her hands out to him. He takes them – of course he does. They are warm. Uncomfortably warm, really – burning under the skin with flame-licks of anger. He squeezes, and she closes her eyes. “I need you to convince me not to burn it down, Barry. I could – they took _Taako_ , and I –” she sucks in a ragged breath, opens her eyes again. He feels them like lanterns searching his face. “Why shouldn’t I burn it all down?”

The words dig into him, and he squeezes her hands again. Too tight, maybe, but for a moment it doesn’t matter. For a moment it is just them – just Lup and Barry, alone in a sea of wonders and discarded laundry. He feels that same pull on his heart, the one he’s trusted his entire life. He takes a breath. “That’s not what we do,” he says.

“But he’s my _brother._ ”

“And we’re here for a mission. We discover and we save, Lup. We don’t decide who dies.”

Her eyes flicker, like they’ve absorbed some of the flame that burns under her skin. “Who says that’s true? We could, we decide everything else, every other _stupid thing_ –” She cuts herself off and makes a sound like she’s choking, curling her head down so it rests on his shoulder. The only sound for a moment is her uneven breathing. “I don’t believe that,” she whispers finally. “I _don’t_ , I just –”

“I know,” Barry says. He pulls one hand out of hers to run it along her hair, slip it gently over the shining curls. “I know.”

She shakes her head once, where it has settled against him. “This fucking _sucks_.”

Barry smiles into her hair. That is Lup – compassionate, resilient, determined. “Yeah,” he says, “but think of how many guilt cookies you’ll be able to get from Taako for skipping out early this year.”

Lup laughs. The sound is the slightest bit off, choked, but it fills Barry’s chest anyway. “My cookies are better, and you know it.”

“Maybe,” Barry allows, and Lup just shakes her head at him in disappointment as she rises to her feet. Her eyes are red-rimmed, but also more present, somehow – she looks less like to explode the world out of spite, and more like she needs sleep. 

“Let’s just take care of this magical glowstick and get ourselves outta here, yeah, babe?”

“Yeah,” Barry repeats, and steps back to watch as Lup strides out the door. “I’m with you.”

It’s a quiet last few weeks in this cycle, now that they have the Light. Barry makes something close to a hundred cups of tea, brings them to Lup, teaches her to match the curl of her breath to the billowing steam. He gets used to talking while she cooks, explaining his research in far too much detail just to fill the slightly-too-empty air. He and Lucretia take turns sleeping in Lup’s room, curling up next to her and pressing their backs together – it’s what Taako does when she has bad nights, and the bad nights are many now.

Their escape from the Hunger is uneventful, as these things go; Davenport steers the ship masterfully, and nobody looks back as they skirt through the planes. When Barry resettles into his original place on the Starblaster, white beams fading from his vision, he sees Lup launch herself at the newly formed shape of her brother where he now stands regaining his footing.

“You are such an _idiot_!” she cries, and punches Taako in the shoulder right before throwing herself around him in a vice grip. Barry can’t see her face, but he’s sure she is crying. 

“Ugh – Lu, get _off_ , gross, I’m fine,” Taako grumbles. But he makes no attempt to push her away, and his hands clutching onto her jacket are white-knuckled.

“You can never do that again, you hear? No leaving me behind! Barry had to manage me on his own and that’s just not fair to him!”

Barry immediately turns beet red as Taako fixes his eyes on him. He lifts an elbow to scratch at the back of his head. “I, uh… it was fine? Really. I don’t mind.” His eyes fly open as he realizes what he’s just said. “No! I mean not that I don’t mind that you died! That sucked, bud, but, uh… the hanging out with Lup part? That was fine. I mean, not fine, because of the whole world ending thing, but…” he trails off to see everyone on the deck staring at him.

“Hold on,” Merle says, and snatches Lucretia’s notebook out of her hands. He ignores her indignant, “Hey!” and opens it up. “Could you start that again? I want to take notes for the next time I wanna pick up a lady.”

Barry’s face feels like it’s engulfed in flame as Lup laughs into Taako’s shoulder. It’s a wet sound, but when she pulls her head back her face is clear. She looks happy. Whole, in a way she hasn’t been since Taako died. “I’m not sure that’ll work on plant creatures, Merle-man, but it’s worth a shot.” She tugs on Taako’s hand, pulling him toward the kitchen. “Come on, ‘Ko. You owe me cookies for emotional distress.” 

Taako makes a face, but allows himself to be led. “I’m the one who died,” he mutters. “What about my emotional distress?”

Just before the kitchen swallows him up, Taako glances back at Barry. He looks down at where his hand is intertwined with his sister’s, then back up at Barry’s face. He gives a shallow nod.

The tangled knot that’s been sitting in Barry’s stomach starts to unravel. These moments with all of them together, before any new trials set in, before any new goodbyes – these are what carve themselves into his heart. This is his family. He wants to see them happy. He wants to see them _safe_.

“Hey, guys, look!” Magnus’s voice comes from the window, where he is watching the land pass underneath them with glee. “This city is shaped like a cake!”

That cycle, Lup faces the crew, haloed by the light of a crystal filled with mechanized souls.

“This is the point where we get to decide who we are,” she says. Her eyes flicker to Barry, just for a moment, before turning to the rest of them. Her expression is fierce and unyielding. “I refuse to let us be the type of people who could destroy an entire world– for _any reason_. This – this isn’t us! This can’t be how we do this!”

Barry watches it happen, standing to the side. Her words tattoo themselves somewhere that he’s not sure he can even reach, yet, but that marks him indelibly. He thinks, _Oh. This is what I’ve been waiting for_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> let me know what you thought with a comment or a kudo!! or find me on tumblr @[kimbertsurprise](https://kimbertsurprise.tumblr.com/)!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucretia! More Blupjeans!

The 33rd cycle has been quiet so far. This world is empty, as far as they can tell – no cities, no flickers of movement as they maneuver the Starblaster across the horizon. The entire crew seems to let out a breath. It’s always easier in cycles with no people. A bit boring, a bit lonely, maybe. But it’s fewer memories they have to keep. Fewer souls to weigh them down.

Barry is on duty to scout the Light, wrapped in a blanket on the deck of the ship and staring over the hull. This world is pretty, in a barren kind of way: very few trees, just soft, waving grasses. The rhythm they wave to is calming, and Barry matches his breathing to it: in, out. Swaying back and forth, even though he can’t feel a breeze.

“I’d like to go down there, I think,” a voice says, and Barry is startled from his contemplation. He turns at the quiet tap of footsteps to see Lucretia, lit softly by the single kitchen bulb and the door open behind her. She is holding a notebook and a chair. When she gives him a questioning look, he shifts his chair slightly to make room and she drags hers next to him.

“To find the Light?” Barry asks, as she settles into the chair and shakes a blanket out over her lap.

She shrugs. “Not really, no,” she says, and then laughs. “I mean, yes, of course. But more… it feels important to capture it all, I guess. And I think Merle might like to hear…” She trails off, tucks the blanket more securely under her thighs. It is quiet for a moment. Barry is sure they’re both thinking about the same thing: Merle, just a few days ago, dissipating into black smoke at the kitchen table. It wasn’t the first time, of course. But it somehow never gets easier.

“I’ll go with you, if you want.”

Lucretia looks surprised. “Will you? I assumed…” Barry gives her a cocked head and a sideways look, and she laughs. “Gods, you look just like Taako when you do that.”

He grins. “Been practicing.”

“I can tell.” The smile lingers on her face for a long moment. “I guess I assumed since Lup was here, you would… well, wouldn’t want to leave.”

Barry fights the blush that threatens to rise at anyone’s mention of Lup. “She’ll probably want a few months without me around, anyway. We’ve spent a lot of time together recently.”

“You know that’s not true.”

Barry coughs. “Well.” He shifts in his chair – uncomfortably; like so much on the Starblaster, these kitchen chairs were designed for a limited journey, not for comfort – so he’s facing Lucretia more directly. It’s been thirty three years, and she still looks just like she did at the Institute. But there’s something behind her eyes, now, even though her face is as unlined and smooth as ever – there’s something for all of them. A wisdom. An age that will never show on their skin. “You know I’d come with you anyway, though, if you wanted. I love you, Luce. I’d come just to support you, even if I wasn’t very into… well, avoiding things I’d rather not confront.”

Lucretia ducks her head, fiddles with her fingers. “Thank you,” she says softly. “It’s hard…” she lets out a breath, and it stirs some of the hair from her face. “It’s hard not to feel separate sometimes, I guess. Everyone seems so sure of themselves, and I…”

“Sometimes that’s not always great. Remember when Magnus was convinced he could invent a new microwave and blew Captain’s eyebrows off?”

She laughs, the loud, unrestrained sound that comes out so rarely, and Barry smiles. As her laugh fades, the only sound is the soft whisper of the Starblaster passing through the sky.

“We’re all figuring it out, all the time,” he says finally, slowly. “And we all know how lost we’d be without you.”

Lucretia blows out a breath. “Yeah?”

“Absolutely.”

When she looks up from her hands, she is smiling. He nudges her shoulder with his, and they both turn to look at the sky – just in time to see a glowing, celestial-white Light streak across the horizon.

The next afternoon, Lucretia and Barry decide to hike to a rocky outcrop not far from where they’ve parked the Starblaster. It’s not a mission for the Light – it’s just for research, just so Lucretia can write down what she sees and explain it to Merle later. Davenport seems conflicted about letting them go, but glances at the empty seat that Merle had been in earlier that week and sighs. “Just be careful,” he says, and his tail flicks behind him. 

The grasses are still, almost eerily silent as they start their hike. Neither Barry nor Lucretia interrupt that silence – they are not especially talkative people by nature, and something about it seems to bear respecting. It’s not until they’re working their way through the now-familiar routine of setting up camp that Lucretia speaks. 

“Do you still… do you ever miss anything from home?”

Barry looks up from the tent pole he’s fitting into its slot. “Miss anything? From Twosun?”

“I… yes. It’s silly, don’t worry about it.” Her face is hard to make out under the darkening sky, but she ducks her head like she’s embarrassed. 

He puts down the pole. “No, I – geez, Luce, of course I do. All the time.”

She tucks her arms around herself and steps closer to peer at the tent. Without looking at him, she says, “I was just thinking about my mother’s carrot cake. I miss everything about her, obviously, but I just… really want some of that carrot cake.”

Barry’s smile feels soft on his face. “I was thinking about honey and apples the other day. And my mom’s gefilte fish, starting dinner.”

Lucretia looks up curiously. “Gefilte fish?”

“It’s like… fish meatloaf, I guess.” The face Lucretia makes is so comically disgusted that Barry laughs out loud. “It’s better than it sounds, I promise.”

“It better be,” Lucretia murmurs, and bends to pick up the other side of the tent pole.

“I bet Taako would make a pretty good carrot cake if we asked him to,” Barry says, watching her carefully. As much as he can in the greying twilight. “If you want.”

Lucretia fits the tent pole into its allotted placement with precision. When she straightens, she is smiling. “We’ll ask him tomorrow,” she says, and then her face lights up as she looks over Barry’s shoulder. “Oh! The grasses are moving again!”

Barry turns to look, and the sway is almost hypnotizing – so much so that he barely reacts as Lucretia slips by him to step off their stone oasis and get a closer look.

The instant her foot hits soil, the grass surrounds her.

It coils up around her legs so fast Barry barely sees it happen – one moment Lucretia is smiling, alight with the thrill of discovery, and the next she is enveloped in gold-green-purple stalks of vicious, twining plant stems. 

Barry tries everything he knows as quickly as he thinks of it, but by the time he manages to tug Lucretia away from the grass and back onto the rock, she is gasping. The welts on her arms and legs are quickly turning a sickly, dark black.

“What do I – Luce, oh my god –”

“Poison, I think,” Lucretia says weakly. Every movement looks pained, but her voice is surprisingly calm. 

Barry, on the other hand, feels anything but calm. He feels like his heart is breaking. Again, why does this _keep happening_ – Lucretia’s face is so young, and he knows it’s been thirty three years but it feels like he’s just seeing her in that auditorium, bright and shining and hopeful.

She presses something against his hands, something soft and leathery. Her notebook.

“You have to write it down,” she says, and she sounds like she is fighting for every word. “Everything. _Everything_. This world and everything you miss and – Taako will ignore it and Magnus will just draw pictures of ducks and we can’t – we have to _remember_. Promise me, Barry.”

He clutches the notebook so hard he thinks his fingers might dig through it. “Okay,” he says. His voice cracks over the word. “Okay.”

Lup finds him there the next morning, Lucretia’s unmoving head in his lap as he writes furiously in the notebook settled his knee. She doesn’t even ask what happened, just shoots fireballs until the entire field is burning, until they have a path back to the Starblaster made of charred roots and ash.

The next cycle, he hands Lucretia a notebook brimming with ink, and her smile is big enough to light the sun.

“I’m not starting a revolution for you.”

“Come on.”

“I’m not! We don’t know anything about the context or what they actually want!”

“It’s not even a revolution! It’s just… convincing a few employed students that their librarian boss-man is a draconic, oppressive overlord who doesn’t deserve their time or loyalty.”

“Lup.”

Her eyes gleam at him from where her chin is propped in her hands. “I may have already submitted your name as a speaker and there might be dire consequences for me if you don’t show up.”

“Lup!”

“Knock ‘em dead, babe!”

As it turns out, standing behind a podium in jeans and a blue button down, Barry has a lot to say about the importance of being valued and respected in a workplace environment. It also turns out that being the centerpiece of a political uprising is a lot more work than he imagined. 

Lup gives him a wink every time she passes him scribbling manifestos and passing them out to students. “Told you,” she mouths, and he makes a face at her.

By the end of the year, the campus has formed its own tiny, academic republic, and Barry’s likeness is being planned for a statue. Lup makes fun of him for years. She also steals a copy of his original speech from the revolutionary archives.

Barry frames it on his wall.

The years pass, cycle after cycle and rebirth after death after rebirth. They all learn to mark years by who isn’t there to witness them, and Taako takes great pleasure in messing with whoever happens to die in any given cycle. (“Hey, Mags, after you died we found a cave just like _full_ of dogs. Just so many.” “You did not! Lup, did you really?” “Sorry, babe, true story – you know elves can’t lie.” And a casual wink tossed in Barry’s direction.)

It’s not that Barry gets used to it, per say, but he does learn to manage the highs and lows, take joy in the small moments. Lucretia and Magnus rope him into “Team Human” dinners, and he gets familiar with the sound of Taako’s huff as the three of them shoo him out of the kitchen to make an attempt at cooking (it never goes well, but it’s always worth it). He catalogs the warbling, muffled sound of Davenport singing opera in the shower, learns to use it as a wakeup call. He studies magic – so much magic, more than he ever thought he would have a chance to learn, and feels it balloon inside him until he thinks he might burst. There are family scroll nights, sightseeing trips, magic competitions. 

And through it all is Lup. Brilliant and irreverent as she was when they first met, challenging him and teasing him and comforting him in equal measure. Lup, who slides papers on arcane theory under his door at midnight, and asks him for his opinion on them over the breakfast table – he’s read them by then, of course, every time. When the rest of the crew groans (“Too early for thinking, Lulu” is a Taako staple) she just laughs and says, “Barry wants to talk about it, doesn’t he?” And he does, of course. Every time.

Lup, who wakes him up before the sun rises, just like she did in his messy dorm at the Institute all those years ago – glowing, laughing, ready for anything. She pulls him out the door of the Starblaster, through forests, beaches, galaxies, and points things out on the way – the way the stars twinkle differently here, how the curve of that ocean looks just like the smile of someone who got punched and lost a tooth. It’s with her that Barry feels for the first time, looking out over the ruins of an ancient and long-dead civilization, that he’s _succeeded_ – that he’s seen everything his father wanted him to and more. 

It makes him cry, and Lup helps him through that, too.

Lup, whose death feels like a thousand daily blows to the chest, every time it happens. She is bold and brave and protective, so she dies more than most – less than Merle, of course, but about on par with Magnus. He understands her reasons. It doesn’t stop his heart from aching for days, weeks, months on end. It doesn’t stop him from only feeling settled in his body again once the bonds let her go.

Lup, who wraps her arms around him or clasps his hand or touches his shoulder after she’s been gone, no matter for how long. Who seems to know that this is the only thing that grounds him – feeling the warmth of her, the solidity of her presence. 

When they land in cycle 47, something feels different. The world itself is far from the strangest they’ve seen – it follows a fairly traditional pattern of biology, actually, and the buildings they’re flying over look almost like they could be from Twosun. But the moment they enter this plane, it hits all seven of them in a cacophony: thousands of songs, of stories, of symphonies and poems and folk tales that ram into them like a bullet train. 

It takes a few moments for the sound to fade, and Barry is left feeling breathless and shaky. But it’s not the panicked, desperate feeling he’s used to from countless planar trespasses – this is more cathartic. It’s like his body was a conduit for so much beauty that it was hollowed out to make room, and now his own thoughts and experiences are creeping back in on tenterhooks, thinking, _Is this the same place I left?_ He feels emptied. He feels whole. He feels inspired and relieved all at once.

He meets Lup’s eyes across the deck, and they reflect exactly what he’s feeling, so clearly that he smiles.

They land, and learn from Chancellor Marlow exactly what is needed to get the Light of Creation this cycle. Davenport tells them to take a few days and decide what they want to submit to the mountain before signing up for areas of study. It’s important, he impresses upon them. Don’t shirk this.

All through the conversation, the same few notes are playing through Barry’s mind. Just a hint, just the beginning – but he’s learned to trust himself by now, and the phrase of music echoes in his head in a way he can’t ignore.

Barry goes back to his room. He sits on the floor – neither the bed nor the tiny desk seem right for this moment. He pulls a spare sheet of paper toward himself, draws a messy staff, remembered from the piano lessons he took as a child. He puts his pen to the page.

And the door bursts open.

Lup is standing there, her IPRE jacket tied carelessly around her hips and a sheaf of paper in one hand. Her face is lightly flushed, and her curls are barely held back with a bandana. “You started?” she asks, and her voice is breathless.

Barry is stunned into silence by the sight of her, suddenly unable to form words. She doesn’t wait for him. “I thought we could do it together,” she says, stepping inside his room and brandishing the papers at him. “I thought we could… write something. Together. If you want.”

She is stumbling in a way Lup never stumbles, her empty hand fidgeting and her face a light pink. It’s this more than anything else that helps Barry find his voice and say, “You want to write something together?”

Lup finally meets his eyes, and her expression is exasperated but fond. “Yeah, babe. That’s what I was thinking.” And then she looks unsure again, a look that is so foreign on Lup that Barry barely recognizes it. “If you want. Only if you want. I could ask Taako…”

The calm that washes over him feels borne of someone else. He is, all of a sudden, so completely certain that nerves seem laughable. This is what he’s been hoping for years, after all. Ever since he was brave enough to notice. 

“Yeah,” he says, and watches the grin light Lup’s face like a sunrise. “Yeah, I want that. I really want that.”

She steps lightly over to him and settles on the floor. Her knee brushes his and, as she leans over to see what he’s writing, her hair smells like something spicy and floral. She hums lightly as she looks at the page. “I like where you’re going here,” she says slowly, “except for one problem. You forgot to actually write anything.” 

When she smiles up at him, with her chipped tooth and her sunflower eyes, it’s the face of a woman he took so many years to fall in love with, over and over and over again. 

He falls, one more time. 

He keeps falling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was a little random, I know -- hazard of having this written as a one shot and then breaking it up. but I hope you enjoyed! comments and kudos always appreciated, or come chat with me on [tumblr](https://kimbertsurprise.tumblr.com/)


	6. Chapter 6

Barry dies, sometimes. It’s usually a stupid mistake. The first time he dies from a lab explosion (not the last, and Taako will never let him hear the end of it), the bonds have barely left his vision before Lup is buried so tightly against him he has no choice but to stumble back into the wall of the ship, letting it hold them both upright. 

“I almost had it,” he says to the top of her head, and huffs as she releases a hand to punch him lightly in the side. 

“How ‘bout you run your experiments by me before you test them, babe, what do we think about that?” Her voice is muffled in his robe.

“Okay,” Barry concedes. “Your math is better than mine anyway.”

He laughs as Lup mutters, “Damn straight,” and doesn’t let go of her hand as she drags him into the kitchen. It only felt like seconds to him, true, but he doesn’t like the time apart any more than she does. 

He dies fighting the Hunger with Magnus, speared by a black tendril and pierced with relief as the Starblaster winks out of sight in the sky.

He dies with Davenport, dropped into the ocean by pirates that couldn’t be convinced to give up the Light.

He dies alone, trapped in a cave by a rockfall after pushing a village girl to safety.

It stops feeling special, after a while. But the warmth that surrounds him when he reforms on the Starblaster never gets old. 

Cycle 74 comes with little fanfare. They never do, these days – it’s just new world after new world, escape after narrow escape. Barry sees it happening, like walls closing in: the Hunger is getting closer. It’s getting smarter, it’s getting faster, and this crew that he loves so much, his _family_ – they are getting tired. 

He starts spending as many nights as he can with the Light of Creation, turning it over in his hands, poking and prodding and casting any spell he can think of. It hasn’t yielded much so far, given that he generally only has a few days with the Light before the Hunger descends and they have to evacuate the planar system. Lup helps, when she’s around, but she’s often needed elsewhere – in the intervening years, she has become something fierce and terrifying in her power. She can stop things the rest of them often can’t. 

It is one of those nights when Barry is sitting in his and Lup’s room, staring at the notes he made about the Light the cycle before. They’re gibberish, mostly. Hopeful rather than useful. Lup would be able to help him make sense of them, but she’s gone – off on a scouting mission with Magnus and Lucretia to find the Light before anyone else does. He tries not to let missing her interfere with his research, but it’s hard. He’s gotten used to having her with him, prodding and pushing or just snoring while he works. 

Barry sighs and puts down the papers, lifting a hand to rub the bridge of his nose just as there is a knock at the door. This in itself is rare – the crew doesn’t knock anymore. Seventy four years of sharing the same tiny spaceship have effectively stripped away all personal boundaries. But there is a knock, and Barry looks up with surprise to see Merle standing sheepishly in the doorway.

“Hey, kid,” Merle says, and shifts on his feet. “Got a minute?”

It takes a second for Barry to nod, confused as he is, but then he does quickly and gestures to the bed. “I – yeah, come in.”

Merle waddles in, stepping over the detritus littering the floor. “This you or Lup?”

“Both of us, really.”

“Figures,” Merle says, and snorts. “Kids these days.”

Barry, who is well used to this kind of grumbling from Merle, just smiles and leans back in his chair. “What did you want to talk about?”

Merle doesn’t answer, instead scrambling up onto Barry’s bunk and shoving aside a discarded t-shirt to give himself room to sit. His legs dangle off the side. “Whatcha working on?”

Barry wants to ask again, but he knows Merle – he knows he’ll get to it in his own time, in his own way. So Barry just sighs. “It’s the Light. I’m trying to figure out what it is, what it does, what it wants… I don’t know. Anything, really.”

“Got anything so far?”

Barry scrubs a hand over his chin. “Nothing.”

Merle watches him for a moment, kicking his feet. The flowers woven into his beard are pink and yellow this cycle, and they gleam in reflection in his glasses. “Weird how it makes you want to hang out with it, huh,” he says, and Barry blinks. 

“Want to –” Barry pauses, frowns. “What do you mean?”

“You feel it, right?” Merle wiggles his fingers. “It’s got some sorta celestial pheromone. Like the good plants.”

“Ew.” The sound comes out reflexively. Almost definitely born of his time with the twins. 

“Don’t hate me because I’m right.”

“I –” Barry takes off his glasses fully this time so he can better rub at his eyes. “Did you want something, Merle?”

Merle snorts and kicks his feet once more. Then, without warning, he says, “I’m doing Parlay tomorrow. Wanted someone to know.”

Barry’s hand drops from his face, and he scrambles to shove his glasses back on so he can see the dwarf clearly. “You’re – what? You’re not telling anyone?”

“Nah,” Merle says, and the calm in his voice is so completely opposite from the feeling in Barry’s chest that it feels like they’re having two different conversations. “Dav doesn’t want me to do it anymore, but I feel like I’m getting somewhere, so…” He shrugs. “Thought I’d see if you had any questions.”

“Questions.” Barry is scrambling. Can he stop this? Should he stop this? It’s been 74 years and they haven’t learned nearly enough, so any intel is good information, but Merle has been gone for so many cycles. It always feels wrong when one of them is gone, even though it happens all the time. It makes the ship feel off kilter. 

The question that comes out is not tactical, or useful. “Why do you keep doing it?”

Merle huffs out a breath like he’s amused. “You think I have a plan?” But Barry can’t pull himself together enough to make a joke, so Merle settles back and seems to consider the question. “There’s something there,” he says slowly, and catches his beard in his hand. “Like I can get to him if I just keep trying. There’s a person in there, you know?” He shakes his head. “It’s just one big unfinished conversation. Always hated those.”

Barry thinks of his parents, the last letter they ever sent him. “Me, too.”

Merle’s face is contemplative. “Do you ever wish you could keep talking to someone after you’re dead?”

Barry’s half-laugh surprises him. “Don’t we kind of do that all the time? Death doesn’t really stick for us, you know.”

“Yeah, but what if those months in between didn’t matter? All these conversations with John, ending so quick – be nice if I could just hop right back in, no pause.” 

Barry isn’t sure what to say to that. It’s not like it’s something he’s never thought of – whenever Lup dies, whenever any of them do, he’s left feeling like he wants to skip ahead to the next cycle. How much better would it be if they never had to deal with that?

“Ah well. Just me, then,” Merle says to Barry’s silence, and sighs as he hops down from the bunk. “Come get me tonight if you think of anything. But not too late, cuz that’s Merle time.” And he waggles his eyebrows. Barry tries not to cringe – it only encourages him – and watches as Merle waddles out the door. 

The next day, Barry is the only one in the kitchen to see Merle disappear into smoke. He tucks shaking hands in his pockets and tries not to think of what he’ll tell Davenport. Instead, he thinks of the flower Merle left on his bed – bright pink and curled like an open palm. He thinks about what he would say to Merle if he weren’t dead until the next cycle, what it would be like if the smoke resolidified into a cranky old dwarf sitting in the kitchen. He thinks about carrying on a conversation after death.

And he has an idea.

He stops in his tracks, staring at the shabby cabinets without seeing them. Sometimes his brain gives him things he doesn’t necessarily want, but this… can he even really consider this?

It takes him three days to determine that the idea isn’t a bad one. Terrifying, yes, and maybe impossible, but also potentially useful. He pulls out books that he hasn’t touched in years, necromancy tomes that started to seem pointless when he realized life and death weren’t following any kind of traditional rules anymore. He starts calculating. He doesn’t stop.

Lup bursts into their room on the third night. “I’m back, babe, and you won’t believe what Magnus tried to eat this time –”

She cuts herself off when she sees Barry hunched over the desk, his notes about the Light pushed to the side and scattered haphazardly on the floor. She puts her hands on her hips. “Did you miss me so much you forgot to act like a person again?”

Barry feels like he’s swimming up from a mile underwater. When he looks up at her, she is radiant and mussed and he missed her _so much_ , but his brain doesn’t feel entirely connected to his body and – “I have an idea.”

Lup blinks. She takes in the room, scans a glance over Barry. She doesn’t make a joke, doesn’t tell him he’s had a thousand ideas before and so many of them have led to nothing, or to disaster. She just fixes her eyes on him, luminous and steady in the darkness, and asks, “Good or bad?”

The love that balloons in his chest is so buoyant, so all-encompassing, that he knows instantly. It’s almost too much, true. But they can do this.

“Good,” he says, and she smiles.

She steps over to him, casts Mage Hand to close the door, and picks up one of the papers he’s been scribbling on. It’s a drawing – a lich, crackling with lightning energy. “Okay, she says. “Talk to me.”

Barry wakes up with Lup’s face pressed into his chest. Her legs are warm and heavy curled around his, and half her hair is in his mouth. When Barry skims a hand up her side, she squirms against him and buries her head deeper.

“S’not time yet,” she grumbles.

Barry smiles. He can’t resist pressing a kiss to her hair, and laughs as she tightens around him. “Taako’s waiting for us,” he says, but his hand slips lightly under her shirt to trace a pattern into her back. Sometimes he still can’t believe that he’s allowed to do this. That the years of waiting and hoping and wishing actually ended in this – Lup, pressed up against him, tangled in the same sheets.

“You’re bringing up my brother while you feel me up?” Lup asks, her voice soft and sleep-filled and attempting anger. It doesn’t work. She just sounds disgruntled.

Barry drops another kiss onto her head. “I would never,” he says, and she huffs. Barry gives her a moment, breathing deeply before he murmurs, “We really do have to get up if we’re going to do this.” His words get a little lost in her mass of curls, but she seems to hear them anyway. With a sigh, she presses herself up, using his stomach as leverage so she can tilt her head to look at him.

Her eyes are worried. “You do still want to do this, right?” she asks. Despite being barely awake, she is frank – she has always been frank. “Because I would understand if you backed out, babe, this is a big thing and we don’t know what’s going to happen –”

“Hey.” Lup falls silent as he cuts her off, but her face is tight. Barry reaches out, indulges himself by letting his fingers slip into her hair before he cups her cheek. “I love you.”

Lup’s face softens. She reaches up to press her hand over his where it rests on her face. Intertwines their fingers. “I love you too, babe.”

“We’re gonna be fine.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

When they get up from the bed, their hands are still tangled together. They walk to the top of the hill they picked out months before, and somehow it’s just like it’s always been – there’s no tension, no pressure. It’s just Barry and Lup.

They pass Taako, who is standing several yards away from the carved whale bone and glaring. His arms are wrapped around himself like he’s cold. “You’re late,” he says without preamble, and Lup sticks her tongue out at him.

“Barry’s fault, he couldn’t keep his hands to himself,” she says, and Taako’s face goes from tense to disgusted in the space of a blink.

“GROSS,” he says loudly. “You’re making me get up early to watch you die and then you’re being gross? No fair. Taako didn’t sign up for this.” His ears are pressed back so closely against his head they’re almost invisible in the gold of his hair.

“You signed up for this when you came out of the womb after me,” Lup retorts, but she squeezes Barry’s hand and lets go to step across the dewy grass toward her brother. Taako’s face is a mask of outrage over barely concealed terror, and Lup dips her head close to his, reaches out to take his hand in her own. She presses her other thumb into the crease between his eyebrows. 

Barry stops watching. This moment isn’t for him. 

Instead, he checks a rune, watches the sun peek its way over the hill. He takes a deep breath, relishing the coolness of the air in his throat, in his lungs. He twirls a stick in his hands, rubs the pads of his fingers along its rough edges. He catalogs every moment.

When Lup comes back to him, her eyes are shining. Without a word, she pulls him in – tucks him against her in a hug and doesn’t let go. 

Barry sinks into it, the feeling of Lup in his arms. Her strength, her softness, the pillowed feel of her cheek against his. He holds her tighter, memorizes the way she moves and smells and breathes. He lets the sensation of it overwhelm him for just a moment, lets himself feel it so deeply his chest feels tight. When they pull back, he presses a kiss to her lips and goes to move away, but Lup doesn’t let him get very far. 

Their faces are only inches apart as she traps his between her hands. “You ready?” she says, and her breath tickles the hair on his forehead. “Are – are you sure you’re gonna be able to keep it together, once you turn?”

And Barry looks at her – the woman he has loved for decades, before he even knew what love was. The woman who has taught him more about the multiverse than he ever hoped to discover on his own. Her face is the same as when they met, with golden eyes and wild hair, but he understands, now – he would follow that face anywhere.

He’s going to be fine.

So he smiles, with everything in him, and says, “Yeah. I got this.”

The lightning, when it comes, feels like it was made for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's a very good chance I'm adding a chapter to this, but I promise it's mostly written and won't make this too long a wait. as always, comments and kudos are a delight if you feel like leaving them, and I appreciate you all so much for reading!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you thank you thank you to everyone who has been commenting! i've had a wild ride of a few weeks so this is later than i planned and i haven't been able to respond to all your comments, but they make me so, so happy and grateful.
> 
> we skim through the last stolen century years pretty quickly here, so this is... the chapter. big hit. big sad. i hope you like it!!

The cycles keep coming, losses stacked upon one another, year after year. The Hunger is getting smarter, getting closer. And each failure feels personal – Barry has all this power now, and still, _still_ he can’t figure out how to stop this.

He and Lup die more often, in an effort to protect the crew. Death hasn’t been uncomfortable for years, but now it has an added tinge of annoyance: when he’s in his lich form, everything feels a bit greyer, a bit less focused. And it doesn’t always work. Despite their best efforts, Magnus dies three times in three years, always trying to stop something bad from happening to someone else. Lup yells at him each time he reappears on the Starblaster – “Stop _dying_ , that’s literally what Barry and I are here for!” – but he just shrugs and grins. The bruise around his eye crinkles. 

Barry keeps studying the Light, as often as he can. He and Lup make a pact: if either of them calls the other on not sleeping enough, it becomes an immediate nap and snuggle sesh. The phrasing is Lup’s, and she ends up invoking the pact much more often than Barry does. She sees it, he thinks. The desperation growing behind his eyes. Because he can feel it, and Lup has never missed anything he feels.

The moments of peace are fewer and farther between. Barry does his best to cherish them, even when he is clothed in red and sparking with necromantic energy.

“I mean, the Conservatories, I guess,” he says, trying not to look too wistfully at Lup’s hands as she scrapes the last of Taako’s stew out of her bowl. It’s probably too spicy for him – it’s probably a good thing he can’t eat it. “For obvious reasons.”

Lup smiles at him, and his body – even in lich form – tries to blush. Her smile widens. “Oh sure, honey, that was a good one. But man, the food in Tesseralia though. It’s hard to beat that.”

Lucretia, who is sitting cross legged and leaning up against the couch, says, “I liked the beach year. I feel like it’s cheating, but that one was my favorite.”

Barry can’t smile at her really, not in this form, but he wants to. She’s grown so much in these years, even if she looks the same. And he’s happy to see her with the crew, an active part of the conversation – she’s been distant, lately. He’s not sure anyone else has noticed, but maybe one night he needs to bring her a cup of tea instead of studying his notes for the umpteenth time.

He laughs as he hears her say, “That’s, uh, kind of perverted? Maybe a little bit?” and Magnus attempt to defend himself: “Well, it was just you know, it was just such a weird – like, how often do you get to know, and like, remember the sensation of dying by being petrified. You know what I mean? Like –”

Barry cuts him off before they can go down the rabbit hole of Lucretia’s year alone. “What about you boys?” he asks, shifting toward Merle and Taako. “Favorite year so far?”

Merle answers, and then Taako, and Barry makes small sounds of affirmation as they talk about hamsters and jello. But he’s not really paying attention, instead watching Lucretia as she stands and moves into the kitchen. There’s something off about the way she moves. Her face is calm, but her expression is almost too careful, and the way she glances around at the crew before stopping at the sink makes Barry sit up straighter.

When she starts singing, he can’t help but calm down – it’s from the Conservatory, and he has such good memories for that year, even if the kid who created that song was something of a nuisance. He turns to smile at Lup, but catches himself at the look on her face. Her hands have paused in scraping out her bowl, and her head is cocked; she looks confused, like the sound is a puzzle she can’t quite figure out.

He’s about to ask when Magnus says, “What’s in this stew?” like it’s affected his brain, somehow.

Barry’s eyes flicker to Taako, who has the expression of disbelief he always gets when he doesn’t understand something. The elf’s voice is high as he says to Lucretia, “So… you’re singing static, right now.”

Lucretia doesn’t stop washing her bowl, just laughs in a way that grates against Barry’s ears and says, “What are you talking about? I’m just, I’m singing… I’m singing…” she laughs again, shakes her head. “God, what was the name of it? From back at the Conservatory, remember?”

Barry says, bewildered, “Yeah, what are you all talking about? I can hear it just fine,” and watches as a spark of _something_ dances across Lucretia’s face, so fast he can’t catch it.

He doesn’t know what this is. He doesn’t know, and he hates not knowing, and panic is building in his chest without a reason he can name as Lup says angrily, “What the fuck is going on? Barry, what are you saying?” She reaches out to him, but he can’t grab her hand, not in this form. “What – what the fuck is happening? Is this Fisher?”

Another spark chases its way across Lucretia’s face. Barry keeps reaching for Lup, and his heart lodges in his incorporeal throat.

Something is happening.

He’s running out of time.

They come up with a plan, cobbled together from pieces of knowledge and built on the bones of all the worlds they’ve lost. It’s risky, but what wouldn’t be? They’re trying to save the world from the living embodiment of nihilism, and they only have a year to make it happen. 

They study, and they plan, and they create. Lup makes an umbrella (“It’s not an umbrella, it’s an _Umbra Staff_ , get it right, dingus –” “Well you look ridiculous, I want that on record and Barry agrees, doesn’t he?” And Barry just stammers until Taako throws his hands up and Lup gives him a kiss on the cheek). 

She won’t let him touch it, won’t open it near him. “It eats magic users, babe,” Lup says seriously, hooking the Umbra Staff over her shoulder. “And your cute butt is all magic these days, so you can just stay over there.”

They present their plan to the crew. It’s tense. Barry watches Lucretia through the conversation, tracks the desperation in her eyes. He lets Lup explain, convince, because she’s always been better with people – but he watches. He sees the disappointment sweep across Lucretia’s face. He thinks of the spark he saw all those years ago, surrounded by static and the only people who matter. He wants to grab her hands, tell her it’s not _her_ , it’s just her _plan_ – and this can work. This is the best way forward.

He’s not completely sure he believes it, but he doesn’t see much choice. 

Each member of the crew imagines an artifact designed to channel the Light’s power into something more manageable, less detectable. It’s the subject of countless hours of debate, endless ribbing.

“You’re making something that can knock someone’s soul of their living body? Damn, Barold, that’s goth as hell,” Taako says, and Lup pushes him on Barry’s behalf.

“Better than Mr. I Just Want the World to Think My School of Magic is the Best,” Barry mutters, and Lup hoots in delight as Taako looks affronted.

Magnus chimes in from across the tiny living space, where he’s frowning over a design he’s been working on for the past few days. An empty wine goblet sits in front of him. “What about Lup’s ‘blow-em-up-and-everything-will-work-out’ glove?” he shouts.

Lup just smiles and shrugs. “Don’t fix what ain’t broken, right? Blow-em-up has worked for me before!” 

Later, Barry will wonder how they could’ve been so naive. He was chosen for this mission because of his maturity, wasn’t he? How could he have failed to see what this would do to them? But they are young, and drunk on the possibility of ending this perpetual chase. So he grins and presses a kiss to the side of Lup’s head, ignores Magnus and Taako’s vocalized disgust as Lup pulls him back to their room.

They make a plan, and they execute it. It doesn’t take long for everyone to realize that execution is exactly what it feels like.

Davenport does not land the Starblaster. They soar, month after month, watching and listening and hoping and dreading in equal measure. Wars rage beneath them. _It’s better_ , they say in quiet voices when they pass each other in the kitchen. _It’s better than it could be_.

Barry starts waking Lup up from nightmares in which she’s trapped, incorporeal, and the world is burning around her. She always thanks him, but her voice is quiet and her expression is blank. He watches her tuck further inward every day. 

It’s two years of tsunamis, of peppermint candy and black glass. It’s two years of floating, separate and stunned, high above the world they’ve chosen to save.

His heart hurts, for Lup and for his family and for this world. And he can’t help but feel a growing sense that they’re coming to a breaking point.

It’s a night like any other, floating over empty space that might become a city. Barry is in bed but wide awake when the door creaks open. There is a beat of silence as he rubs his eyes and the figure in the door pauses.

“Incoming,” comes the whisper eventually, and Barry smiles into the darkness. It’s what Lup said to him the first day she moved into his room, after that night at the Legato Conservatory – or screamed, is maybe more accurate. She launched herself onto his bed while he was already curled up in it, and didn’t leave for 53 years.

When she climbs in next to him this time, it is gentler. Softer. But Barry reaches out just the same, and she fits herself against him with a sigh.

“How are you?” he asks quietly. Some moments require quiet voices.

“Okay,” she replies softly. “Taako did the Thong Song.”

Barry laughs. He saw Taako’s production once, by accident – it’s hard not to see everything the crew has to offer, after 100 years. “Full outfit?” he asks, and feels Lup shake her head against his chest.

“Just the highlights.”

He smiles and lets them lapse into silence. None of them are _good_ , per say, with everything that’s going on. Lup especially, and he doesn’t expect her to be. But there’s something in her now – a purpose, a focus he hasn’t seen for a while. It feels like a good sign.

“Barry?”

He pauses the hand that’s been pulling through her hair, shifts to try to look at her face. It’s not a very successful effort; without darkvision, he can only barely make out the gleam of her eyes, catlike in the dark.

“Someday this is going to get better, right?”

She sounds a thousand miles away from him, soft and quiet and lost. “I hope so,” he replies honestly. It’s the best he can do, and he can feel her sigh as she sinks further into him.

“I hate this,” Lup whispers.

For a brief moment, Barry considers all the platitudes he could give: they made this decision as a crew. It’s better than the alternative. They need to let this play out, they need to do whatever they can to save this world from what they know is possible.

But Lup knows all those things. 

So he kisses her forehead and says, “I know. Me, too.” 

She shifts, twisting so she’s staring at the ceiling. “We can make it better.” Her voice is steel-edged even as it stays quiet, determined. “I believe that.”

Barry blows out a breath. “I believe in _you_.”

There is another beat of silence, and in that moment Barry can’t help but think he’s said something wrong – that anxiety has never gone away, even after all these years. But when Lup answers, her voice is small, and Barry stops worrying about himself.

“Why?”

He rolls on his side to face her, but her eyes are fixed on the ceiling. It might be dark, but he can tell she’s trying not to cry. “Lup. Hey.” 

She takes a deep breath. “I just…”

“Hey.” He tugs on her hip until she’s facing him. “You know you’re the best thing that ever happened to me, right?” The nod of her head is barely perceptible. So Barry continues, “You are. And anything you do, any idea you have, I’m right there with you.”

When she reaches out to clasp his hand, the wave of relief Barry feels is almost dizzying. “I love you,” she says quietly, and he squeezes.

“You, too.”

“I know I’m the best thing that ever happened to you. If you hadn’t met me you’d still be sleeping in your jeans.”

Barry laughs, and it breaks the dark silence like a hammer. Lup’s smiles gleams at him. “Why else do you think I keep you around?”

Lup nudges closer until her lips find his neck. “I can think of a few reasons,” she says, and Barry lets himself be swept away. If his heart is beating too fast, he shoves the worry down.

It’s Lup. She’ll be fine.

It’s an hour past dinner, and he can’t find her. Not rare, necessarily – sometimes she needs a walk, or time to herself. It’s seven people on a tiny ship, after all, and the world is crumbling beneath them.

Still. He misses her.

It’s been three days. She’s been gone this long before, but never without telling him. Never without telling Taako. They peer around corners as if they expect her to jump out with a super soaker. Taako tries to laugh, but he spins around at the slightest sound. 

The bed feels cold.

It’s been a week, and Barry can’t move without alarm bells going off in his head. Where is she, where _is she_. This is wrong. It’s wrong, and the old panic is creeping in, so much so that he can’t breathe.

_Back soon_ , the note said.

Back soon, but it’s soon and she’s not back and he’s _worried_ , so worried he can hardly think. He stops sleeping. His heart beats a drum against his ears every time he lies down in the bed they shared for the last five decades: _she’s gone. She’s hurt. She’s gone._

It’s almost a relief when Taako bursts in late at night with bloodshot eyes and something rolled up in his hand. He takes in Barry twisted in his sheets, then stomps over to the desk and pushes everything off it so he can lay down a map of the continent. “Come over here, Barold,” Taako says, and his voice is brittle like glass. “We’re starting a search party.”

It’s been six weeks, and Barry is slumped over a table on the deck with his head in his hands. The map is spread out in front of him, all his failures marked with little pins. It’s too much. This is too much, he can’t do it without Lup, and what if she’s – what if she’s just –

“How’s it goin’?”

Barry startles upward to see Taako, looking at him with frank eyes. He looks tired. They’re all so tired. 

“Oh, sorry, I –” Barry stops, scrubs a hand over his face. “Sorry.” Taako gives him a faint smile and walks over to the table, stopping with his hand on his hip as he looks down at the map. Barry tries to pull the tattered pieces of his thoughts into something coherent. “So, um, anyway, there’s a dungeon out beyond the Felicity Wilds?” he says, pointing vaguely at a pin on the continent. “It’s a subterranean… demonic… keep, thing. There’s a bunch of arcane energy coming off of it. I was gonna check it out tonight, if you want to come with.”

Taako nods. “Yeah, where were – where were –” he stops, tugs on his ear. “Remind me, how far is that in relation to the last glassing?”

Barry scans his eyes over all the dark circles that mark the places they’ve looked, scattered like bruises. He sighs. “I’ve triangulated it here,” he says, and it feels hopeless to his own ears.

“Seems like as good a place as any,” Taako mutters, and sighs. “Do you want to do the usual? I’ll go down and start casting around, see if I can pick up anything, and then… you start talking to folks?”

Barry nods. “Yep. That’s, uh… I mean, it hasn’t worked so far, but… it’s gotta work one of these times.” The words are building up in him, burning his throat – but not burning, he can’t think of fire, don’t think of fire – until they burst out without his permission. 

“Taako, what if she’s just gone?”

There’s a brief moment of silence, in which Barry can hear his own heart beating. Like a bell. Like a warning. He is dreading the answer, dreading knowing that Taako’s had the same thought. But still, he’s hoping against hope that Taako will say something to make the world seem possible again.

When the answer comes, it is nothing like he expected, dreaded, or hoped for.

“Who?”

Barry blinks, lifts his head from the map – which looks fuzzy, all of a sudden, is he so tired that he forgot his glasses? – to see Taako’s face, crystal clear in front of him. And utterly blank.

“Ta – Taako? Taako, I’m –”

“What if who’s gone?” the elf in front of him asks, and Barry’s heart is slamming out of his chest, trying to tell him something, but he doesn’t know why there’s a scroll spread in front of him and – 

“What are we – Oh god, Lup… Taako, I’m – I can’t remember her face, Taako. Where –”

“ _Whose face?_ ” 

“Is this Fisher?” Barry gasps the words out, even as the elf in front of him starts to go in and out of focus. His face is so familiar and his eyes look like two bright suns but they’re _dead_ , somehow, there’s a blankness there and everything that’s happening is like water slipping out of Barry’s hands – 

“Taako,” he says, and he doesn’t know where the name comes from but it feels _right_ , deep in his chest, so he follows that instinct and continues, “kill me! Right now! I’ll – I’ll remember if I’m a lich, I can – please, Taako, just kill me! It’ll – it’ll be okay! I can’t forget, I’m – I’m begging you, please, Taako, _please_!” Why is he pleading for his own death? _What will he remember_? 

A spell knocks into his chest, hot and painful and familiar but completely unfamiliar because he’s never felt this before, has he? _Has he?_

Barry tips over a railing he doesn’t recognize, tilting his face to the sky. The sun is golden-yellow and bright, like a flower. Like an eye. The bottom of a ship gleams silver and shining above him.

He falls.

He keeps falling. 

The last thing he knows before he hits the ground is a bubble of hope, bursting into static in his chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please let me know what you think!! comments or kudos are swell, and life is less crazy so I can respond now!
> 
> also, big big big thank you to [tazscripts](https://tazscripts.tumblr.com/), without whom this chapter would not be possible.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barry is a lich, and Barry is alone.

Being a lich all the time isn’t something he would wish on anybody. Too many dangers – too much time in his own head, with no one and nothing to distract him. 

Barry floats the continent, slipping into graves and crypts when it feels like someone is following him. Lucretia, probably. Him being alive has messed with her plan, and he knows her well enough to know that she won’t let that stand without a fight.

As he travels, he plays the years on loop through in his mind. The mongooses, the robots, the judges. Puppy Town. The Conservatory, the Arcaneum. All of it, even when the weight of it makes him feel like he might sink.

If no one else can remember, he has to do it.

A little girl finds him in a barn, dark eyed and terrified. She holds a pitchfork, and is trembling so hard Barry thinks she might poke herself in the eye.

“Physical weapons don’t work well on liches,” he says, before he can stop himself. He immediately cringes, can almost hear Lup’s voice in his head. _Most people don’t tell terrified farm children their immediate undead weaknesses, Bluejeans_. _Time and place for teaching moments, what did we talk about?_

But the girl’s hands tighten on the wood handle, and he reads something in the set of her feet – even in her fear, she’s a fighter. Her hair curls around her face. In the dim glow of the single barn torch, it could almost be gold. 

He finds himself adding, “Better to go for a magical distraction. Even Prestidigitation is a good one, cast sparks somewhere else so you can run the other direction.”

The girl blinks. “I don’t…” she clears her throat, shifts her feet. “Dad says magics aren’t something I can learn, on account of I’m so little.”

Merle flashes across his mind, lit up in Fungston; Davenport hopping out of an illusory tree. “I’ve seen some pretty small people do some pretty big magic.”

She looks uncertain now. Barry floats closer to the ground, tries to radiate Magnus’s harmless approachability and Taako’s nonchalant persuasion. “Like this,” he says, and sends a tiny flurry of sparks dancing over her head. 

Her mouth drops open comically quickly, and Barry stifles a laugh. “Can I –” she reaches out, before seeming to realize what she’s done and snatching her fingers back. The pitchfork droops in her other hand.

Barry smiles, as much as he can. “Want to learn?”

Her nod is hesitant, but it’s real. “Okay,” he says. “Watch me.”

As he teaches, Lup is there in his head, as she always is. _Don’t expect it to always work out this well, babe_ , she says, although there’s a smile in her voice. _Someday somebody’s gonna want to scoop that sweet butt off to the Astral Plane_. 

Barry doesn’t know why anyone else would need to grow a body, but there’s no way he’ll let himself be outbid. It’s not a Grand Relic, true, but a body will help him hide – because he can feel it already, today. The chill that means she’s found him. He doesn’t have much time.

Just before he steps into the tank, its eerie glow reflecting on the goblin bodies littering the cave floor, he pulls out a coin. Another magical item he picked up over the months of travel, rusty and dented but promised to help him remember. The merchant seemed confused when Barry flinched at those words, but Barry has spent enough time going over Lucretia’s plan that he knows – he won’t remember anything when he’s in his corporeal form. He needs some way to keep himself on track.

He takes a breath, presses the center of the coin, and starts recording. “Your name is Barry Bluejeans,” he says, and then has to stop as the implication of what he’s about to do shudders through him. He can’t – he can’t do this, it’s too much, he can’t. He won’t remember anything. He’ll be lost, completely confused but _not_ , because he won’t know anything that matters. 

“God, Lup,” he whispers, and the way it echoes around the cave sounds like wind. “Where are you?”

It takes a moment. And then it’s not words so much as a feeling – a sense of warmth, of a hug wrapped tightly around his incorporeal form. It’s not physical. But it pulls him together just the same. 

He gives himself one minute to settle into it, one minute to live in the memory of Lup’s strength. Then he straightens, sets up the map so it will be visible when he steps out of the tank. He presses the coin again, and starts over. He has no choice, after all. He’s the only one who can.

“Your name is Barry Bluejeans. You are afraid of the dark. Your very favorite thing in the world is…”

The worst part, maybe, is the boredom. He comes up with games, sometimes, to make his undead existence more interesting: he spends a few weeks haunting a snobby noble just for the fun of it. It doesn’t take long before the human is giving away most of his gold to charity, spurred by some “invisible conscience.”

Barry thinks Lup might be proud of him for that one.

It’s boring, though, the constant searching. Frustrating to turn up nothing over and over again, to not be sure why he’s looking until he’s too dead to keep at it. So he starts giving his human self fun things to do, new places to see. He pokes around, tries to learn about this world they’re trying so hard to save.

It is on one of these entertainment scouting missions that he floats past a crowd gathered in front of a makeshift stage. They’re all whooping, cheering at something he can’t quite see – until he floats closer, and reads what’s written on the side of the caravan.

_Sizzle it Up with Taako_.

Barry’s heart nearly jumps out of his chest.

And it is – it’s Taako’s face grinning at the crowd, flipping a pancake and transmuting syrup out of milk, bright and sharp-edged and brilliant. It’s Taako’s style, his moves and his signature winks and all that Barry has missed so much, in these years of searching. He looks happy. But Barry can see where he misses steps, makes room for someone who isn’t there, a partnership built on hundreds of years of being together. 

Taako’s here, traveling. Taako’s here, without Lup, without Magnus or Merle. But Taako knows where he’s going next.

It’s something, at least. It’s a place to start.

Barry records a note on the coin, steps into his body, and heads off to Glamour Springs.

Dying crushed by the burning gauntlet in Phandalin feels almost ironic. He rises out of his body, shaking off lightning and frustration and the unbearable feeling that he was _so close_ and also _this is how it feels to be burned alive_ and _no wonder she wanted to stop this_. He hears Taako say from the next room, “I’m not leaving without Barry,” and almost blows his cover then and there.

But Taako won’t remember, and neither will Merle or Magnus. They are harder now than he’s ever known them – more reckless, distorted from nearly ten years of a new life and the wrong history. Barry can’t expect them to be the family he knows. He has to be patient.

He watches with his heart in his throat until they get into the well, and then turns his back on Phandalin to start the long trek back to his cave. The fire burns through him in a raging and terrible comfort. 

He almost has a heart attack, watching the three of them about to drink silverpoint. Shouldn’t Merle know better than that? There’s no reset in this world.

Well. Cleaning up messes is something Lucretia’s become good at, over all these years. Hopefully she can manage this one.

He’s been in his lich form too long, he knows. But consequences seem far away right now, floating and nebulous and untouchable.

It almost didn’t register, the Umbra Staff in Taako’s hand. It felt too familiar – an elf, bright-eyed and sarcastic, wielding a red umbrella and making fun of him. Even the omnipresent crystal could’ve been just another year, another cycle.

But then Barry realized. And that moment, seeing Taako carelessly flick the Umbra Staff with no idea what it meant, _who_ it meant… that brought Barry the closest he’s ever come to losing control. He could feel it happening – the lightning licking over his body, crackling in his veins, begging him to explode. Taako _found_ her? Where? How? _Where_?

How was it not enough to make Taako _remember_?

He’s been floating aimlessly since then, drifting over the remains of cities he’s already searched and trying to decide what to do. It’s been there in the back of his mind for years, the thought that if he finds Lup – even in his living body – she’ll be enough to make everything right again. That she’ll be enough to fix it. 

He’s starting to realize he might need to fix it on his own.

It’s not long before he finds himself back in what was once Phandalin, now a shiny circle of black glass. It looks like a hole in the world. A version of his body is in there somewhere. Maybe Lup is too. 

He’s about to reach down and touch the glass – for what purpose, he’s not really sure – when a chill runs down his neck. He hears a voice say, “I thought I might find you here.”

Barry turns slowly, and there she is – 20 years older, her hair now close-cropped and white, but the same face he saw every day for 100 years. “Lucretia.”

“Hi, Barry.”

She looks regal, official. He supposes this is her Madame Director persona – he wouldn’t know, as he’s never been up to the moon she calls a base. He’s never seen the life she’s built. His voice feels empty as he asks, “Can I help you?”

Lucretia’s boots make muffled thuds in the dirt as she steps up to the edge of the circle next to where he’s floating. “I thought we had it fixed for a while,” she says quietly, staring out across the glassing. 

Barry sighs. “Yeah, well. Best laid plans and all that.” 

He doesn’t want to do this. He doesn’t want to fight with the only person who remembers, the sister he loved for more than a lifetime. He doesn’t want to hash out old arguments, doesn’t want to hurt the only family he has left.

“Barry…” Lucretia shifts her feet, tightens her grip on her staff. “You have to stop.”

Barry can’t help but feel incredulous, even though he knew it was coming. “Stop what? Stop trying to put my family back together?”

She is shaking her head before he even finishes the question. “Stop interfering! You’re confusing them, Barry – you’re making them see enemies everywhere, and that’s _dangerous_!”

“You’re making me the bad guy. What else am I supposed to do?”

“ _Trust me_ , I don’t know!” There are tears in her eyes. “I need them to trust me, I can’t save them if they don’t, and you – you’re making that impossible.”

Barry wants to scrub a hand over his face, press down on his eyes until he can see everything clearly. But his lich body makes that impossible, so he settles for asking quietly, “How else am I supposed to help them?” 

“But that’s what I’m doing! Barry, you don’t have to – I’m helping them enough!”

“Is that what this is? Helping? Magnus thinks he lost everyone he cares about, Merle doesn’t even speak to Davenport, and Taako –” he takes a breath, steadies himself – “Taako doesn’t remember _Lup_. How could that possibly be helping?”

Lucretia flinches at Lup’s name. “I tried,” she says in a low voice. “I tried _so hard_ to find her, to fix this the way you all wanted to, but we were _breaking_ , we were – and Taako couldn’t –”

“That wasn’t your choice to make!” He’s losing control, even though he promised himself he wouldn’t. Lightning crackles across his body. He takes another deep breath, trying to steady himself, and continues, “I know you meant well, Luce, but we have to change this. This can’t be what our lives are now.”

For a moment, he thinks he’s gotten through to her. For a moment, he sees the young, hopeful girl he met in an auditorium all those decades ago, with glasses perched on her nose and a book in her lap.

Then Lucretia straightens, and she is once again 20 years older, shouldering a burden Barry can never touch. “I didn’t come to explain it to you,” she says, and her eyes are hard and clear. “I did what I had to do, I stand by that.”

Barry sighs. His whole body shivers, dips, as the heaviness sets in. “Yeah. That’s what I’m doing, too.”

Quiet echoes through the night, broken only by the sound of the wind sliding across the glass. If he closes his eyes, Barry can almost imagine he’s sitting on the deck of the Starblaster, wrapped in a blanket and watching for a Light to streak across the sky. Laughing with Lucretia about an exploded microwave.

“Hey,” he says impulsively, and Lucretia’s eyes lift to him. “Love you, Luce.”

Lucretia blinks. Something flickers behind her eyes – sadness, maybe? Loss. The smile that flits across her face seems rusty, unused. But it’s real. “Love you too, Barry,” she says.

Barry has only a split second of warning before a bolt of divine energy shoots out of the Bulwark Staff. He disappears before it can make contact.

Later that night, tucked in his cave and about to step into a new body, he’s sure that she missed on purpose.

It doesn’t feel like much of a choice, after that. Barry has always been one to think things through, to consider every angle, but what else can he do, now? Possessing the boys’ roommate and sneaking into Lucretia’s quarters is not rational, not when she is on high alert for his presence and getting kicked out of this body would mean ultimate, permanent death. But it’s necessary.

He’s starting to feel a bit reckless. Lup might be gone, his family doesn’t remember him, and it’s all going to come to a head somehow. He might as well get as much information as he can before it happens. 

So he does what he can, and he keeps doing what he can, even as it gets more dangerous and more insane. He obliterates threats before they even have a chance to reach his family, hundreds more than they are ever aware of. And now, standing in front of a keep he almost visited ten years ago, he thinks about Lup.

_You sure you want to do this, babe?_ He can picture her, hands on her hips, eyeing the cylindrical building. _There are some big bads in there. Could be something you want to plan, maybe?_

Barry has always been one to think things through. He’s had to adjust, though, in these past ten years.

He tucks shaking, shadowy hands into the pockets of his robe, and follows his family into Wonderland.

Everything spirals out of control pretty quickly after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're up for it, please let me know what you thought with a comment or a kudo! They make my day!!


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one took a lot of rewriting, I hope it turned out okay!

He’s on the moon. He’s on the moon, and he’s with Taako and Merle, who feel like friends he met at a party and loved but can’t remember the next morning. It’s stuffy in the pocket spa, the discomfort made even more acute by the fact that he feels like there is something important happening, something he should _know_. His head is aching.

He hears the coin version of himself say, “Okay. Now you should've had enough time by now to get in there and drink. So you should be remembering now, but it may take you a while. But the short version: we’re all –” And then it’s just static, just buzzing in his ears through the canvas, but he’s sure it means _something_. Something is bursting in his head, so close he can almost reach out and grab it, something and some _one_ –

When Taako lets him out of the bag and he stumbles toward the tank, it’s like his body remembers something his mind can’t touch. He is reaching out for the ichor before he even knows what he’s doing, accepting it from Taako like he’s drowning and it’s his lifeline.

He takes a sip, bracing himself – for what, he doesn’t know – and after that, it’s something of a blur. 

He drinks, and it _hurts –_ it fills his head so quickly that he staggers, pressing a hand to his forehead as if he can hold his brain together. It happens so quickly, the realization. The remembering. Finally, in his body, he remembers.

He tries to warn them. “Don’t put up a fight,” he says, even as his head pounds with waves of purple sky and new languages and multiple suns. “You’re gonna start remembering soon, but just take it slow, please, I’m begging you. Take it slow” – but when he looks up to Merle and Taako and Magnus, to Davenport and Lucretia, he sees it all on their faces. The understanding, and the fear. The love, the hurt, the clarity – it doubles, triples, expands beyond measure, blooming like a storm.

It isn’t slow. Like a battle wagon crash, they remember. But even in this moment of terror and grief and anger, Barry feels like he could float off the ground. He isn’t alone anymore. It’s not the same, it’ll never be the same without Lup, but he _isn’t alone_. 

Taako is pointing the Umbra Staff at Lucretia, hands shaking and voice dead, and Barry can only watch. It’s been so many years of working against her, of trying to undo what she created, but he _understands_. He knows her, and he knows what she was trying to save. 

Love doesn’t disappear that easily, even in a war.

So he stays on his knees as they argue, interrupting only to tell Lucretia that her plan won’t work – she knows, she has to know, they can’t lose this world after all of this – and tamps down the burst of selfishness that leaving on the Starblaster would mean. Lup wouldn’t want that. Somehow she feels closer than ever, now that his family is back together. 

He watches Lucretia disappear into a spell she’s been building for decades. The worry bubbles up in his chest – for her or for what she’ll do, he’s not sure, but probably both – but before it can take over he has to shove the feeling down as darkness explodes through the roof. And as a shadowy centaur bursts from the column of tar, eerily reminiscent of the ones from cycle 29, Barry takes a deep breath. 

It doesn’t help for him to be nervous, now. It doesn’t help for him to be uncertain or scared or anything he might usually be. What the world needs right now – what his _family_ needs – is Barry at his strongest. So he takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and imagines.

Lup is there, as she always is, wild-eyed and laughing. She winks at him. “You gonna show us what you got, babe?” 

Barry smiles, tucks the image of Lup into his heart, and lets himself go. 

It is fierce and terrifying, this power, when he really unleashes it. It scares him, honestly – something Lup used to nudge and prod him about, trying to get to the bottom of it – so Barry doesn’t let loose until it’s really necessary.

But it is necessary now.

His heart is beating out of his chest. It pounds a staccato that could be a percussive beat from the Conservatory as the shadows explode around him, one after the other. He flings spells as fast as he can think of them, his wand flashing and sparking with arcane energy. It’s exhausting. Exhausting and thrilling and terrifying, all at once, and all he can do to anchor himself is focus on the group of six people he will never stop protecting. 

The centaur explodes into ash in front of him. There is a pause, and Barry takes a deep breath, scanning through the room for Davenport, trying to see if anyone needs his help. His heart hammers. And as his eyes track around the room, they snag on something ever-so-slightly out of place.

He sees Angus, gripping the Umbra Staff in terrified, shaking fingers, nearly as tall as he is.

He hears Taako yell, “Fucking fine, go for it!”

And he feels it. The power gathering in the Umbra Staff is cataclysmic – huge, unyielding, blindingly bright. And it is so, completely, utterly familiar. 

A Fireball explodes out of the tip of the umbrella (and wouldn’t she kill him for thinking of it like that, even now), barrels into the charging rhinoceros with the force he has only ever seen come from one person. As the heat whispers past him, he swears he hears, _Finally_.

The shadow rhinoceros collapses into cracked skin and smoke. Taako raises the Umbra Staff, the symbol of all of Barry’s hope and fear and despair wrapped into one, and brings it down over his knee. A snap echoes through the room. 

The only thing stopping him from falling to his knees the moment she explodes is the knowledge that it’ll take him that much longer to reach her if he does.

As he stumbles over, he hears Lup say, “Well, why didn’t you let me out sooner, dingus?” and Taako reply, “Well, I didn’t remember you existed, goofus!” and Barry’s body feels a thousand times lighter and a thousand times heavier, all at once. She’s here. She’s _here_.

Barry is shaking as he reaches her. It’s the first time in ten years that the woman he loves is in front of him, that he hears what she’s actually saying and not some poor imitation. She looks just the same – a bright red robe and a shadowed face and hands wreathed in gold and pink and orange flame. She looks like everything he dreamed of.

When she turns to him, his mouth starts talking without his permission. “I – I knew I’d see you again,” he says, and is that true? He doesn’t know, but it doesn’t matter, because Lup is _here_. “I want to – I’m gonna –” he is stuttering, the words are stuck in his throat with his heart, and the warmth radiating off of her is almost too much to bear. It comes out without him planning on it. “I’m gonna blow myself up just so I can be a lich and hold you again – hold on, just –”

Lup’s laugh cuts him off, and immediately sends him scattering through a hundred years of memories. Of being in love. “Don’t blow yourself up, babe,” Lup says, and she is so full of affection and so _present_ , right there in front of him, “I’m sure your beautiful body’s gonna get killed by the Hunger soon enough.”

That pulls Barry back into the moment, into the room of scattered shadows and oily ash. But still, it feels important that she knows. That she understands. “Lup, when I was a lich, I knew you were gone,” he starts, and watches as her form flickers with lightning. He has never wanted to touch her so badly, never felt so trapped in his corporeal form. “It was more than I could bear. And when I was alive, I didn’t know you’d ever existed, which was more than I could bear, and I didn’t – I didn’t –” he’s losing his train of thought as the years crash over him, burying him in the hoping and the desperation and the constant sense that something was missing. 

Lup leans toward him, as close as she can without phasing through him. “Babe,” she says, and her voice is strong. “I love you more than life and undeath itself.” She reaches out to touch his hand, just briefly – Barry feels a strange, buzzing pressure before she pulls away – “But let’s get somewhere safe first, so we can really savor this tender reunion.”

And then Barry is laughing, and he’s sure Lup is grinning under her hood, as much as she can, and everything feels so right that for a moment he forgets that it’s the end of the world.

But, of course, it is.

He doesn’t remember much after Lup reappears – smoke; the bright, electric spark of spells flying through the air; the taste of blood in his mouth. Briefly meeting the Grim Reaper, who he has been avoiding for years now, and who is also apparently Taako’s boyfriend. Not having enough time to really sink into the awkwardness of what that means for family dinners, because there are shadows encroaching, constantly and impossibly, and he has a world to save.

Standing with Lup, facing down an army bigger than anything he’s ever seen, and feeling full of nothing but ballooning, expanding love in his chest. Watching a silver ship wink into a roiling storm.

Barry fights with everything he has, for all the worlds that came before, and for the love of the one he’s in now. He thinks about the little girl in the barn, awed by magic and brave enough to face down a lich with a pitchfork. He thinks about Phandalin, burned to the ground before he could save it, even if he didn’t know what he was trying to do. He thinks about Merle’s kids, and Magnus’s life left behind, and the other thirty nine people lost while Taako tried to find himself. 

It isn’t perfect, this world. But it’s theirs to help.

So Barry follows Lup, and he fights, like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do. Hopefully, someday, it will be enough.

Barry is slumped on Taako’s shoulder. His eyes are closed, both out of exhaustion and a desire not to look at the aftermath of what this fight took out of everybody – the shattered windows, the unmistakable smudges of blood on the floor. This might have been Lucretia’s office, once. He can’t really tell. His body feels like it could melt; he isn’t used to doing this much in corporeal form and not dying, despite Lup’s prediction. 

Taako wouldn’t usually allow this kind of sustained contact, citing personal boundaries and a desire not to mess up his hair. But he is talking to Lup, their voices a quiet hum in the grey morning, and Barry thinks he might want reassurance that today is actually real.

It is quiet, the universe in a long exhale, and Barry could sleep for a hundred years.

Until Taako shifts, and Barry blearily blinks his eyes open. “W’happened?”

Taako just huffs and pushes Barry off him, tugs his shirt into position. He grimaces at the bloodstains. “It’s been an hour. As much as I would love to sit here and play pillow, Barold, Taako’s got people to see.”

“You – what?” Barry rubs at his eyes, tries to focus. It takes him a second to realize he doesn’t have his glasses. “Oh, shit, hold on –” but he is cut off before he can really look by a pair of glasses floating over to him, carried by a phantasmal hand. As he shoves them on his face, he sees the hem of a bright red robe floating off the ground.

Taako rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I just remembered I spent a whole 100 years with you chucklefucks? So it’s time to spread the Taako brand elsewhere.”

Barry blinks again, finally focusing on where Lup is floating in front of him. She gives a pointed nod toward Taako, and Barry follows her gaze to where her brother is looking bruised and battered and exhausted. Somehow, though, he also looks content. “You’re leaving?”

Taako just stands up, grimaces again as he tries to brush off his pants and snags on a rip. “I got a man waiting for me, and a shower. Think you can handle my sister while I’m gone?”

“I –”

“Trick question, she’s been trapped in an umbrella for ten years, just make one pop culture reference and she’ll be lost for weeks,” Taako says, and starts striding away. “You kids play nice!”

Barry sends a helpless glance at Lup, who wiggles her fingers at him. “What do you think, Bluejeans?” she asks. There is a grin in her voice. “Can you handle me?”

Barry does the only thing he can think of: he shakes his head emphatically. And then they are both laughing, and it feels like a balm.

As they quiet, Lup is looking to where Taako left, a fond tilt to her shoulders. “Hey,” Barry says, calming his breath and watching her carefully. He is nervous, all of a sudden. “Are you sure you don’t want to follow him? I’m okay here, you know.”

Lup turns toward him. He knows her well enough to picture the exasperated look on her face, even when he can’t see it. She reaches out for him. “Babe,” she says, and sends just enough energy to her hands to make them solid to the touch for a brief moment. She wraps her fingers around his, squeezes gently. “I can talk to Taako more later. We have time for that.”

Barry releases a breath. Lup’s hands buzz around his, a growing discomfort that he won’t let go of for the world, and he thinks, _We have_ time _._

And then he is crying. “I’m sorry,” he manages, trying for a deep breath to get himself under control. He feels a crackle of energy and a sigh as Lup settles down next to him. “I’m sorry, I just –” he hiccups, realizes her hands are no longer wrapped around his, and clenches two desperate fists. It feels like he’s trying to hold himself together, even though he’s in no danger of flying apart in this form. It’s just – “I missed you so much.”

Lup nudges her hooded face closer to his. “I know.”

“I tried to find you – for ten years, I kept trying and I – sometimes I didn’t know if I would see you again, and _gods_ , Lup, I’m so _sorry._ ”

“Barry.” 

“I didn’t even think –”

“Babe.” Suddenly there is a Mage Hand, tapping three times on his shoulder. A small gesture, one he and Lup have made to each other countless times. Three taps. _I love you_.

The hand continues, draws a clumsy sign in Thieves’ Cant. _Halt. Stop_.

Barry takes another deep breath and holds it, forces himself quiet.

“This was a freaky fucking situation, okay?” Lup says eventually, and Barry is so surprised he lets out a startled snort. He missed her. Gods, he missed her so much. Her voice sounds pleased as she continues, “We’re going to have some shit to work through. But, Barry?” Magic buzzes into his shoulder as she nudges against him. “We’re doing it together. I’m not going anywhere.”

Barry exhales and nods. He twists to face her directly. “I love you,” he says, and smiles as a little bit of lightning flickers down her body.

“You, too, babe,” she says, and her voice is soft. Then she shakes her head and straightens, gestures for him to stand. “And now we take a walk and you tell me everything I missed. How the fuck do you have a _body_?”

Barry stands with her, tucks his hands into his pockets. “This world has some good tech,” he says. She sets off, and he is barely a step behind her. “Although I think maybe I was bidding for it against a cat?”

He can’t see her face as she looks at him sideways, but he’s sure it’s incredulous. “A what?”

“I couldn’t really see his face, but I think maybe. He used to work here, actually, I think Taako stole some stuff from him.” Lup snorts, and Barry grins. “Anyway, I can show you the tank when we get back to my cave, I have some stuff I want to pick up there.”

Lup stops, and Barry pauses next to her. When she speaks, her voice is quiet, like she’s thinking about something. “You have a cave.”

“Yes?”

“By chance, is the thing you want to pick up in the cave… extra jeans?”

Barry swallows. “Um… yes?”

Lup seems to process that for a moment, and then her eyes light up with enthusiastic flame. “Babe! You have a spooky necromancer cave full of jeans!” she cries. “I’m so proud of you!”

Barry grins and sets off toward the door, Lup rattling off questions next to him. They’ll walk for a while, explore the moon neither of them have gotten to see. Lup isn’t nearly as nonchalant as she’s pretending, he knows that, but it’s okay. She’s here, and he’s here with her. They’ll figure it all out together.

For the first time in ten years, they have time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> will there be an epilogue? yes, absolutely there will be an epilogue


	10. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> beach day! beach day!

It is a summer day, unremarkable only in that he’s had them before and will have them again. The single sun is bright and warm on his shoulders, the sand soft and insistent between his toes. Barry’s supposed to be reading – he brought a textbook he’s been meaning to make corrections on for months. But instead, he’s watching the waves lap against the shore, listening to the sounds of Taako and Magnus attempt a chicken fight against Carey and Killian while Angus eggs them on in equal measure.

Lup lifts up on her elbows from where she’s tanning on the towel next to him. “You can go swim if you want,” she says, and her eyes are full of laughter. “Since it’s your favorite thing and all.”

She teased him mercilessly about that, about what he chose to record to help himself remember. “You hated swimming when we met!” she cried the first time she heard it, her shadowy lich form bent over the coin in the days after Story and Song. “You only started because you were too embarrassed to talk to me!”

Barry blushed and stammered, of course, but he didn’t mind. Her teasing meant her _presence_ , and that was something he was never going to take for granted again. He just reached for her incorporeal hands, and once again contemplated blowing himself up so he could hold her properly.

“I’m good here,” he says, and nudges closer to her on the towel. 

She laughs, but twists so she’s on her back and grinning up at him. “Just right there?” she asks. “You’re sure you don’t want to be a little closer?”

Well, he doesn’t need to be asked twice. 

He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to it, the feeling of Lup’s lips on his. That was true on the Starblaster, even after 53 years. But now… he’s lost her and forgotten her and found her all over again. Being able to touch her is like an everyday miracle.

She hums and sifts her fingers through his hair. She’s been like that, ever since the day of her freedom. Touching everything, seeming lost if she’s not wrapped in something soft. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night to her gripping his hand so hard he thinks it might bruise, blanket around her shoulders and pressed high against her cheeks like a cape.

Barry just pulls her close, on nights like that. He gets it. He has nightmares, too.

Today, though – today is lazy and painted in sunshine, and his heart is calm as he sinks into Lup. He could stay here all day.

Until something hits him in the back of the head.

Lup makes a surprised noise as Barry tips off her, just in time to see a massive beach ball bounce into the sand a few feet away. As it lands, Barry hears Taako shout, “Lulu! Stop corrupting Barold and come show Maggie how to be good at chicken!”

There is an indignant “Hey!” and a loud splash, followed a few seconds later by a Taako spluttering, “Good chicken partners don’t break the code, my dude, you never drop your top!”

Lup is laughing as Barry scrambles into a seated position. He rubs his hand on the back of his neck as he looks at her. “Probably should’ve seen that one coming, huh,” he says.

“Probably, yeah.” Lup makes a face in Taako’s direction. “He’s never going to leave us alone now.”

“Remind me why we like your brother again?”

“Gene pool, we’re stuck with him.” Lup sticks her tongue out at Taako again, then turns back to Barry and tilts her head. Her smile is devilish. “Should we see how uncomfortable we can make him before he breaks?”

“I mean –” and then he is cut off by Lup’s mouth on his, and he loses any thought of protest. This is good. He could live here now.

Until another beach ball hits him in the back.

“This is a family vacation!” Taako yells.

There is a small giggle, and Angus’s voice floats over. “Yeah, Miss Lup, it’s a family vacation!”

“That didn’t take much,” Barry mutters, and Lup grins at him.

“We’ll keep experimenting later,” she says, and then raises her voice to yell at Taako. “‘Ko, you cannot have corrupted tiny Ango so quickly. And you, boy genius, I thought you knew better than to listen to my brother!” She pushes to her feet, brushes sand off her thighs, and smiles down at Barry. Angus and Taako kick up sand on their way over, presumably to stop them from continuing the experimentation, and Barry can’t help but sigh. Especially as Lup adds loudly, “Hey, Ango, did I ever tell you that Barry won a sand-castle making contest in cycle 39?”

Angus tilts his head, pausing right at the edge of Barry’s towel. “I don’t remember hearing about that one in the Voidfish’s song…” he says uncertainly. 

“What do you think, Bluejeans?” Lup asks, eyes sparkling as she nudges Barry with her toe. “Care to show off your prowess with beat up ocean rock and a bucket?”

Barry shakes his head, even as he gets to his feet. “First off,” he says, and tries not to get distracted as Lup’s grin widens, “it was not a sand castle making competition, it was an architecture school in a world that just happened to use sand as their building tool. And –”

“Nerd alert,” Lup whispers loudly to Angus, who breaks into a delighted grin. 

Barry sighs like he’s trying to be long-suffering, but he’s sure it just comes across fond. “Come on, Angus,” he says. “I’ll teach you about alien sand architecture.”

“That would be great, Mr. Bluejeans, sir! I have so many questions!”

He keeps chattering as they walk down the beach, leaving Lup to hook her arm around Taako’s neck and attempt a noogie. The sound of their slapping disappears into the waves as they get farther away. Barry is getting better at this, he thinks, at leaving her. It barely makes him panic at all now, six months later.

He is trying to organize Angus’s questions in a way he can answer them when he notices a figure, sitting alone with their toes buried in the sand. Once he realizes who it is, Barry makes a decision very quickly. “Hey, Angus?”

“Yessir?”

“Give me a minute, would you?” At Angus’s sound of affirmation, Barry sets off in the sand toward Lucretia.

He comes up to her quietly, his feet barely whispering in the sand. Now that he can remember, all the multiclassing he did is coming to good use. Her eyes are down, fixed on her toes as they wiggle further into the beach. She doesn’t look up as he settles next to her.

“So,” Barry says after a moment, “Lup told Angus I’m an expert in building alien sand castles.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Lucretia’s mouth tip up at the corners. “What did you tell him?”

Barry stretches out his legs. “Well, I said it was an architecture school that just happened to use sand, but I probably forgot to mention a few key pieces.”

“Like the fact that you practiced with a plastic bucket and bright green shovel you made Taako transmute for you before giving your master’s presentation.” She is smiling now.

“And that I had help,” Barry points out, and Lucretia ducks her head. She doesn’t seem to want him to see the smile, which is fighting its way off her face. But it’s true. Lucretia was right there with him that year, measuring and sketching and offering suggestions. It was because of her that he learned how to draw an actual blueprint.

Barry digs his hands into the sand. “We miss you, Luce.”

Lucretia lets out a short, pained laugh. “You don’t.”

“We do.” Barry shifts so he’s facing her, ignores the fact that she’s still looking at her knees. “It might not be the same, but hey.” He nudges her shoulder. “We still need you.”

When Lucretia finally looks at him, her eyes are swimming. “Barry. You don’t, and that’s _okay_. I… I did a dramatic thing.” Her voice breaks, and she tucks her elbows around her knees, tugging them closer. “I don’t regret it. It was the right thing at the time, but I… I understand if you’re mad at me. If everyone is still mad at me.”

Barry lets his eyes track down the beach, to where Taako and Lup are laughing together. Lup sees him looking and starts jumping up and down, waving enthusiastically, before Magnus dunks her in the water. Taako sees who he is sitting with and turns away, so deliberately there’s no doubt of his intention. 

Barry sighs. “I think there’s going to be some anger for a while,” he says carefully, “but a while doesn’t mean forever. Even if things are never exactly what they were, they’ll get better. And Luce –” he pauses, nudges her again with his shoulder – “we’re family. I love you, and nothing is going to change that.”

She blinks a few times, opens her mouth, then shuts it again. Barry hesitates, then puts a hand on her shoulder and uses it to push himself to his feet. When standing, his hand is still extended. “Want to help me and Angus make a sand Bureau? We need you for the details.”

Lucretia looks at his hand for a moment, then grabs it and hauls herself to her feet. 

And as they step down the beach together, toward Angus’s beaming smile, sand unspools beneath Barry’s feet. It feels the same as it did so many years ago, gritty and soft and shifting under his toes, and promises the same – infinite possibilities. Infinite ways to explore.

He and Lucretia will laugh at Angus’s attempt to make sand castles and teach him what they know about the architecture of other worlds. Later that night, Barry will sit around a bonfire, Lup settled in his lap, and eat fantasy s’mores off sticky fingers. He will bury his face in Lup’s hair and breathe deep while she laughs, wrapping himself in her warmth and her strength and finally – _finally_ – her joy. He will surround himself with his family, finally safe and brilliantly expanded, and soak up the comfort they’ve earned after so many years of running.

And the waves will crash in the background, pushing and pulling in a steady pattern he can match to his heartbeat. The pattern, he knows, as Lup tucks her head against his neck and closes her eyes, that will make up the rest of his life.

There are worse ways to spend the next hundred years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so, so much to everyone who has stuck with this story! I put a lot into this fic and I'm really proud of how it turned out. as always, come say hi on tumblr @[kimbertsurprise](https://kimbertsurprise.tumblr.com/), and let me know what you thought! if you've been commenting this whole time, you are the absolute best.

**Author's Note:**

> look I KNOW that his name is actually Barry Bluejeans but the idea of Lup giving him the name was just too cute I couldn't not
> 
> comments and kudos are always so appreciated! this is my first taz fic and I love feedback. my tumblr is a very random place to be, but i also love friends so come find me @[kimbertsurprise](https://kimbertsurprise.tumblr.com/)!


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